Semantic MediaWiki/contributing

This page is a parallel to Developer cheat sheet for contributing to MediaWiki, for SMW.

Refer to the project's own Contributing to Semantic MediaWiki for the big picture perspective.

Developer Cheat sheet

Semantic MediaWiki extensions have all largely adopted the Gesinn IT Docker-based continuous integration approach to development. There are many good reasons for this, chief among them is that it allows you to setup a complete (integrated) environment along with all the code, dependencies, tooling and conventions for developing, debugging, testing and contributing enhancements. Case in point: dependencies. There are JavaScript dependencies defined in package.json, PHP (and development) dependencies defined in composer.json, and Extension dependencies defined in extension.json.

Once you've cloned a particular extension (e.g. SemanticResultFormats), then you want to execute a submodule update to pull in the build environment.

# change to the src directory
cd ~/src
# clone a SMW extension that you want to work on
git clone https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticResultFormats
# make sure you've got the latest code
git pull
# and create a branch to work on
git checkout -b 940-gallery-overlay-and-redirect-fix
# now we initialize the build system
git submodule update --init --remote

Then, also create a .env file in the project root to override the environment variables used by the build system

# .env file example
MW_VERSION=1.43
PHP_VERSION=8.1
DB_TYPE=mysql
SMW_VERSION=6.0.1
PF_VERSION=5.7 # compatible with MW 1.43
NODE_JS=true  # Enable Node.js for JavaScript tests

You can also create a docker-compose.override.yml file in the 'build' directory. This example exposes a port on the host so we can view the web container at http://localhost:8080

services:
  wiki:
    ports:
      - 8080:8080  # Use port 8080 for MediaWiki

Error about docker not running?

# note that if you've been working with docker-desktop, you may need to reset your docker context to 'default' from 'desktop-linux'
docker context ls
docker context use default

Finally install the build system

# Install the build system
make install
# and check docker process status
docker ps
# run the Continuous Integration target of the makefile
make ci

More is covered at PHPUnit/using_PHPUnit

Semantic MediaWiki = See Metadata

PHP is the HyperText Preprocessor = the most popular programming language for the web

JavaScript = A computer language.