Automated deployment of MediaWiki

As a contributor to Meza, and developer of QualityBox, we've been closely following the efforts in the MediaWiki community around easier/automated deployments of MediaWiki. Actually, it's a goal of the MWStakeholders Group. And, it's a crucial aspect of the whole 2017 Wikimedia Technology Department Goals since at least 2018. Here is a list of some of the efforts and projects within and outside the WMF for automating deployments of MediaWiki:

• Our own efforts: MediaWiki on Kubernetes

WMF

• https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/project:releng/dev-images+ Gerrit repo for "dev-images": Docker images for local MediaWiki development. Considered experimental (2020/08). Can be used with Docker Compose. Published to the WikiMedia Docker Registry, e.g. https://dockerregistry.toolforge.org/wikimedia-buster/tags/
• Phabricator workboard for MediaWiki-Containers

For Distributors

• Per RFC, distributors can override DefaultSettings.php with includes/PlatformSettings.php
• OPEN task: Allow DefaultSettings.php be overridden by environment variables - Important for Kubernetes

MediaWiki with Kubernetes

• https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/releng/local-charts/ Gerrit repo for using Minikube and Helm charts to define MediaWiki local development environments: Alpha (2020/08)

MediaWiki on Docker

• Docker Library Docs
• Docker Library Docs for MediaWiki
• Wikimedia base docker images for production by lavagetto (Giuseppe Lavagetto - Italy)
• MediaWiki-Docker (distributed with MediaWiki)
• MediaWiki-Docker-Dev (Addshore's GitHub repo) for using Docker and MediaWiki (Developers) See also: MediaWiki API library It's a library for making it easier to work with the MediaWiki API. Good to know/use/contribute. One member of a group of libraries to interact with WikiData, etc. (docs) Addwiki repos are by Addshore, Jeroen DeDauw and Sam Wilson.
• Official Docker repository of MediaWiki
• Wikimedia Git repo of the Docker official image for MediaWiki (forked from https://github.com/benhutchins/docker-mediawiki)

Node Services

• MediaWiki Node Services Run several MediaWiki nodejs services (RESTBase, Parsoid) in a single docker container. Useful for small / low-memory installs. By WMF's d00rman (Marko Obrovac - Croatia) and gwicke (Gabriel Wicke - Menlo Park)

Lex Sulzer

• Set up BlueSpice MediaWiki Enterprise Distribution by lexsulzer (Lex Sulzer at Dataspects - Zurich, Switzerland)
• Dataspects' Easy System Cloning

Configuration Management and Deployment at WMF

It should be noted that the WMF uses Puppet for configuration management (See the operations/mediawiki-config repo), and Scap3 (which is used in SWAT) (obsolete) for deployments. There is the Cloud VPS which is powered by wp:OpenStack for projects related to the Wikimedia movement. The environment includes access to a variety of data services. Cloud VPS is meant to make it easier for developers and system administrators to try out improvements to Wikimedia infrastructure (including MediaWiki), power research and analytics, and host projects that are not viable in the Toolforge environment. Virtual machines running on Cloud VPS are subject to the instance lifecycle.

Puppet

• https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Puppet
• https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Puppet_coding

Config Settings

With any automation tooling and deployment, you will inevitably need to refer to the long list of MediaWiki Configuration settings.