PGantt

PGantt is a Gantt diagramming tool that integrates with Phabricator. It makes it much easier to reason about the time constraints, milestones, and planning than the tools available in Phabricator itself. It uses the Conduit API to access the Phabricator data objects and stores all the planning data together with the tickets in such a way that it is visible and editable in the Phabricator UI.

Building

You will need Go and NodeJS installed on your machine. Once you do, simply type:

$ go generate ./...
$ go build ./cmd/pgantt

If you're a Daedalean employee, do the following instead:

$ DDLN_GANTT=1 go generate ./...
$ go build ./cmd/pgantt

The above will create a self-contain pgantt executable that you can move to whatever location in your system you wish. It will not store or read any data locally except for the configuration file described below.

Configuration and Running

PGantt reads the Arcanist credential data and uses it to authenticate with Phabricator, so chances are good that you don't have to configure anything and can start using it right off the bat. If, however, you've never used Archanist, create the ~/.arcrc file along the following lines:

{
  "hosts": {
    "https://phabricator.yourdomain.com/api/": {
      "token": "cli-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
    }
  },
  "pgantt": {
    "projects": ["Test", "Test 2"],
    "port": 9999
  }
}

You can get the API Token by visiting: https://phabricator.yourdomain.com/conduit/login/.

Since the Phabricator's Conduit API does not allow for easy qurying of the information necessary to run PGantt, PGantt fetches all the information abount all the projects you follow at startup, and then does smart updates, polling, and data caching. This means that the regular opration is fast, but the startup is slow. Therefore, you may want to limit the number of projects PGantt follows by specifying them in the config file. If you're impatient, you may also follow in more detail what is happening by adding -log-level Debug to the program's commandline.

You can simply run the PGannt executable in the terminal window:

$ ./pgantt

It will start serving the user interface at http://localhost:9999 of whatever other port you configured.

Developing

The changed Javascript needs to be recompiled with go generate which is very slow. To avoid this, once the local ./pgantt server is up, start a separate server for the UI with:

$ cd ui
$ npm run-script start

Wait a bit for it to start, then open the displayed URL. The page in the browser is updated automatically when the Javascript files are changed.

Configuring Phabricator (for administrators)

PGantt needs the additional planning data to be stored along the tickets. Therefore, you need to configure your Phabricator instance to keep track of these extra data fields. To that end, go to Config -> Application Settings -> Mainphest -> maniphest.custom-field-definitions and add the following JSON definitions in the editor window and press the Save Config Entry button.

{
  "daedalean.scheduled": {
    "name": "Scheduled",
    "type": "bool",
    "default": false,
    "view": true,
    "edit": true
  },
  "daedalean.start_date": {
    "name": "Start Date",
    "type": "date",
    "view": true,
    "edit": true
  },
  "daedalean.duration": {
    "name": "Duration",
    "type": "int",
    "default": 0,
    "view": true,
    "edit": true
  },
  "daedalean.type": {
    "name": "Type",
    "type": "select",
    "default": "daedalean:task",
    "options": {
      "daedalean:task": "Task",
      "daedalean:milestone": "Milestone",
      "daedalean:project": "Project"
    },
    "view": true,
    "edit": true
  },
  "daedalean.progress": {
    "name": "Progress",
    "type": "int",
    "default": 0,
    "view": true,
    "edit": true
  },
  "daedalean.successors": {
    "name": "Successors",
    "type": "text",
    "default": "[]",
    "view": true,
    "edit": true
  }
}

Phabricator then seems to need to have these fields enabled in Config -> Application Settings -> Mainphest -> maniphest.fields. Simply go there and press the Save Config Entry button.

You're all set!