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@title Diffusion User Guide: Managing Repositories
@group userguide
Guide to configuring and managing repositories in Diffusion.
Overview
========
After you create a new repository in Diffusion or select **Manage Repository**
from the main screen if an existing repository, you'll be taken to the
repository management interface for that repository.
On this interface, you'll find many options which allow you to configure the
behavior of a repository. This document walks through the options.
Basics
======
The **Basics** section of the management interface allows you to configure
the repository name, description, and identifiers. You can also activate or
deactivate the repository here, and configure a few other miscellaneous
settings.
Basics: Name
============
The repository name is a human-readable primary name for the repository. It
does not need to be unique
Because the name is not unique and does not have any meaningful restrictions,
it's fairly ambiguous and isn't very useful as an identifier. The other basic
information (primarily callsigns and short names) gives you control over
repository identifiers.
Basics: Callsigns
=================
Each repository can optionally be identified by a "callsign", which is a short
uppercase string like "P" (for Phabricator) or "ARC" (for Arcanist).
The primary goal of callsigns is to namespace commits to SVN repositories: if
you use multiple SVN repositories, each repository has a revision 1, revision 2,
etc., so referring to them by number alone is ambiguous.
However, even for Git and Mercurial they impart additional information to human
readers and allow parsers to detect that something is a commit name with high
probability (and allow distinguishing between multiple copies of a repository).
Configuring a callsign can make interacting with a commonly-used repository
easier, but you may not want to bother assigning one to every repository if you
have some similar, templated, or rarely-used repositories.
If you choose to assign a callsign to a repository, it must be unique within an
install but do not need to be globally unique, so you are free to use the
single-letter callsigns for brevity. For example, Facebook uses "E" for the
Engineering repository, "O" for the Ops repository, "Y" for a Yum package
repository, and so on, while Phabricator uses "P", "ARC", "PHU" for libphutil,
and "J" for Javelin. Keeping callsigns brief will make them easier to use, and
the use of one-character callsigns is encouraged if they are reasonably
evocative.
If you configure a callsign like `XYZ`, Phabricator will activate callsign URIs
and activate the callsign identifier (like `rXYZ`) for the repository. These
more human-readable identifiers can make things a little easier to interact
with.
Basics: Short Name
==================
Each repository can optionally have a unique short name. Short names must be
unique and have some minor restrictions to make sure they are unambiguous and
appropriate for use as directory names and in URIs.
Basics: Description
===================
You may optionally provide a brief (or, at your discretion, excruciatingly
long) human-readable description of the repository. This description will be
shown on the main repository page.
You can also create a `README` file at the repository root (or in any
subdirectory) to provide information about the repository. These formats are
supported:
| File Name | Rendered As...
|-------------------|---------------
| `README` | Plain Text
| `README.txt` | Plain Text
| `README.remarkup` | Remarkup
| `README.md` | Remarkup
| `README.rainbow` | Rainbow
Basics: Encoding
================
Before content from the repository can be shown in the web UI or embedded in
other contexts like email, it must be converted to UTF-8.
Most source code is written in UTF-8 or a subset of UTF-8 (like plain ASCII)
already, so everything will work fine. The majority of repositories do not need
to adjust this setting.
If your repository is primarily written in some other encoding, specify it here
so Phabricator can convert from it properly when reading content to embed in
a webpage or email.
Basics: Dangerous Changes
=========================
By default, repositories are protected against dangerous changes. Dangerous
changes are operations which rewrite or destroy repository history (for
example, by deleting or rewriting branches). Normally, these take the form
of `git push --force` or similar.
It is normally a good idea to leave this protection enabled because most
scalable workflows rarely rewrite repository history and it's easy to make
mistakes which are expensive to correct if this protection is disabled.
If you do occasionally need to rewite published history, you can treat this
option like a safety: disable it, perform required rewrites, then enable it
again.
If you fully disable this at the repository level, you can still use Herald to
selectively protect certain branches or grant this power to a limited set of
users.
This option is only available in Git and Mercurial, because it is impossible
to make dangerous changes in Subversion.
This option has no effect if a repository is not hosted because Phabricator
can not prevent dangerous changes in a remote repository it is merely
observing.
Basics: Deactivate Repository
=============================
Repositories can be deactivated. Deactivating a repository has these effects:
- the repository will no longer be updated;
- users will no longer be able to clone/fetch/checkout the repository;
- users will no longer be able to push to the repository; and
- the repository will be hidden from view in default queries.
When repositories are created for the first time, they are deactivated. This
gives you an opportuinty to customize settings, like adjusting policies or
configuring a URI to observe. You must activate a repository before it will
start working normally.
Basics: Delete Repository
=========================
Repositories can not be deleted from the web UI, so this option is always
disabled. Clicking it gives you information about how to delete a repository.
Repositories can only be deleted from the command line, with `bin/remove`:
```
$ ./bin/remove destroy <repository>
```
WARNING: This command will issue you a dire warning about the severity of the
action you are taking. Heed this warning. You are **strongly discouraged** from
destroying repositories. Instead, deactivate them.
Policies
========
The **Policies** section of the management interface allows you to review and
manage repository access policies.
You can configure granular access policies for each repository to control who
can view, clone, administate, and push to the repository.
Policies: View
==============
The view policy for a repository controls who can view the repository from
the web UI and clone, fetch, or check it out from Phabricator.
Users who can view a repository can also access the "Manage" interface to
review information about the repository and examine the edit history, but can
not make any changes.
Policies: Edit
==============
The edit policy for a repository controls who can change repository settings
using the "Manage" interface. In essence, this is permission to administrate
the repository.
You must be able to view a repository to edit it.
You do not need this permission to push changes to a repository.
Policies: Push
==============
The push policy for a repository controls who can push changes to the
repository.
This policy has no effect if Phabricator is not hosting the repository, because
it can not control who is allowed to make changes to a remote repository it is
merely observing.
You must also be able to view a repository to push to it.
You do not need to be able to edit a repository to push to it.
Further restrictions on who can push (and what they can push) can be configured
for hosted repositories with Herald, which allows you to write more
sophisticated rules that evaluate when Phabricator receives a push. To get
started with Herald, see @{article:Herald User Guide}.
Additionally, Git and Mercurial repositories have a setting which allows
you to **Prevent Dangerous Changes**. This setting is enabled by default and
will prevent any users from pushing changes which rewrite or destroy history.
URIs
====
The **URIs** panel allows you to add and manage URIs which Phabricator will
fetch from, serve from, and push to.
These options are covered in detail in @{article:Diffusion User Guide: URIs}.
Repository Identifiers and Names
================================
Repositories have several short identifiers which you can use to refer to the
repository. For example, if you use command-line administrative tools to
interact with a repository, you'll provide one of these identifiers:
```
$ ./bin/repository update <identifier>
```
The identifiers available for a repository depend on which options are
configured. Each repository may have several identifiers:
- An **ID** identifier, like `R123`. This is available for all repositories.
- A **callsign** identifier, like `rXY`. This is available for repositories
with a callsign.
- A **short name** identifier, like `xylophone`. This is available for
repositories with a short name.
All three identifiers can be used to refer to the repository in cases where
the intent is unambiguous, but only the first two forms work in ambiguous
contexts.
For example, if you type `R123` or `rXY` into a comment, Phabricator will
recognize them as references to the repository. If you type `xylophone`, it
assumes you mean the word "xylophone".
Only the `R123` identifier is immutable: the others can be changed later by
adjusting the callsign or short name for the repository.
Commit Identifiers
==================
Diffusion uses repository identifiers and information about the commit itself
to generate globally unique identifers for each commit, like `rE12345`.
Each commit may have several identifiers:
- A repository **ID** identifier, like `R123:abcdef123...`.
- A repository **callsign** identifier, like `rXYZabcdef123...`. This only
works if a repository has a callsign.
- Any unique prefix of the commit hash.
Git and Mercurial use commit hashes to identify commits, and Phabricator will
recognize a commit if the hash prefix is unique and sufficiently long. Commit
hashes qualified with a repository identifier must be at least 5 characters
long; unqualified commit hashes must be at least 7 characters long.
In Subversion, commit identifiers are sequential integers and prefixes can not
be used to identify them.
When rendering the name of a Git or Mercurial commit hash, Phabricator tends to
shorten it to 12 characters. This "short length" is relatively long compared to
Git itself (which often uses 7 characters). See this post on the LKML for a
historical explanation of Git's occasional internal use of 7-character hashes:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/10/28/287
Because 7-character hashes are likely to collide for even moderately large
repositories, Diffusion generally uses either a 12-character prefix (which makes
collisions very unlikely) or the full 40-character hash (which makes collisions
astronomically unlikely).
Next Steps
==========
Continue by:
- returning to the @{article:Diffusion User Guide}.
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