Collections

The Collections extension has been in flux with the evolving situation with PDF handling in MediaWiki. The information here is retained for reference purposes. This notice will be removed and the information updated once a new Collection extension is available.

A single article or collection of pages can be output in a variety of formats; on-demand

Books (Collections is the formal software name, Books is the more User-friendly feature name) allows you to export any content you want from the wiki into formats more suitable for offline reading, sharing, printing etc.

Books is a feature of this wiki, added by mw:Extension:Collection which in turn relies on a host of other goodies such as Python's setuptools, Imaging Library^[1], and a whole render server which is supplied by PediaPress. Because of the Python dependencies, you should make sure you have a proper Python, which at the time of this writing ^[2] means 2.6 or 2.7 (maybe later a 3.x version?)

Users

See the help page at Help:Books

For Developers and Admins

there is a

wiki,
discussion group
as well as an IRC channel at #pediapress
http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/wiki/WikiToPDF

Installation

To get the MediaWiki Document server going locally, follow the guide on pediapress.com

cd
mkdir -p $HOME/lib/python2.7
# edit .bashrc to alias python to python2.7 (already installed on system)
MYENV=WIKI
wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/virtual-python.py
python virtual-python.py --no-site-packages
wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
sudo python ez_setup.py
sudo easy_install virtualenv
virtualenv --no-site-packages $MYENV
cd $MYENV
source ~/WIKI/bin/activate
./bin/pip install -i http://pypi.pediapress.com/simple/ mwlib
./bin/pip install -i http://pypi.pediapress.com/simple/ mwlib.rl
mw-zip -c :en -o test.zip Acdc Number
mw-render -c test.zip -o test.pdf -w rl
# view error messages and view pdf file for results
wget http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/pdftk-2.02-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install libgcj
sudo rpm -i pdftk-2.02-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
# or do a user install of pdftk
mkdir $HOME/src
cd $HOME/src
wget http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/pdftk-2.02-src.zip
unzip pdftk-2.02-src.zip
cd pdftk-2.02-dist/pdftk
make -f Makefile.Redhat > make.log 2>&1
cp pdftk ~/bin/

Successfully installed mwlib pyparsing timelib bottle pyPdf apipkg qserve lxml py sqlite3dbm simplejson roman gevent odfpy Pillow greenlet

Note that the --clean-cache option of mw-serve is meant to be used from a cron job to clean up, NOT as a configuration option in your --daemonize script.

I needed to create a script similar to the following so that the service would be available after system restarts (from http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/tools/mw-serve/mw-serve.sh)

#! /bin/sh
# run this service automatically in run-levels 3 or 5
# see chkconfig for more detail
# on debian/ubuntu use sysv-rc-conf
# chkconfig: 35 90 10
# description: mediawiki-serve - does document conversion to PDF
#
# Script for running the MediaWiki collection server (which converts articles to PDF)
# See the wiki for more information
# Author: Greg Rundlett <greg@freephile.com>

case "$1" in
start)

echo "Starting mw-serve... "
# defaults to FastCGI, port 8899 on localhost, no daemonization
su -c "PATH=/usr/kerberos/sbin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/root/bin \
PYTHON_EGG_CACHE=/var/cache/python-eggs \
/usr/bin/mw-serve \
--daemonize \
--cache-dir='/var/cache/pdfserver/' \
--mwrender-logfile='/var/log/mw-pdf.log' \
--mwzip-logfile='/var/log/mw-zip.log' \
--mwpost-logfile='/var/log/mw-post.log' \
--logfile='/var/log/mw-serve.log' \
--pid-file='/var/run/mw-serve.pid' \
--report-from-mail=greg@freephile.com \
--report-recipient=greg@freephile.com" www-data
;;

stop)
PIDFILE=/var/run/mw-serve.pid
if [ -e $PIDFILE ]; then
PID=`cat $PIDFILE`
echo -n "Stopping mw-serve, killing PID $PID..."
if ! kill $PID; then
echo "can't kill it."
else
echo "done."
rm -f $PIDFILE
fi
else
echo "mw-serve does not appear to be running."
fi
;;

reload|force-reload)
echo "Reload not supported for mw-serve yet."
;;

restart)
"$0" stop && "$0" start
;;

*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/mw-serve {start|stop|restart}"
exit 1
esac

exit 0

Digital Ocean

todo Install, verify and document process of setting up local render server

I have not installed a local render server, but on 2016-01-09 I did update the Collection extension. The new setup renders through pediapress. When I get a chance, I'll take a look at the current development status of the book tool and related efforts like Offline content generator

References

↑ sudo yum install python-imaging or sudo apt-get install python-imaging should do the trick, but make sure you have a proper python
↑ ~~~~

[1] sudo yum install python-imaging or sudo apt-get install python-imaging should do the trick, but make sure you have a proper python

[2] ~~~~

[1]

[2]