May 2021 – addshore

Tech Lead Digest – Q1 2021

August 28, 2023May 24, 2021 by addshore

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Tech Lead Digest (wmde)

At some point last year I started sending a weekly internal digest to the Wikidata Wikibase team with my tech lead hat on.

The emails are internal only but contain lots of links to reading, podcasts and general goings on that could be useful to everyone.

So here is my first Wikidata Wikibase tech lead digest digest!

🧑‍🤝‍🧑Wikidata & Wikibase

A collection of Wikibase specific logstash dashboards were created
We moves our secondary CI from Travis to Github Actions (ADR)
We archived WikibaseCodesniffer, choosing to use the upstream mediawiki-codesniffer
Deployment of the Wikidata Query Service UI was moved to microsites
wdwb-tech phabricator boards were recreated, funneling towards a prioritized tech backlog.
We created a team site, which contains a list of all code repositories that we own and interact with as a core part of Wikidata / Wikibase. (git repo)
Browser tests came up as a hot topic. A deep dive and some central analysis occurred seemingly correlation failures with “memory compaction” on VMs. This is out of our control, so we increased timeouts in some key areas.

mediawiki-docker-dev, a history

May 26, 2021May 22, 2021 by addshore

MediaWiki-Docker-Dev (or MWDD) is a development environment for MediaWiki, based on Docker and docker-compose. It was created back in 2017 at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna where it had a slightly difference feature set and focus. (Original Slides).

Since inception the git repo now has 180 commits from 20 authors over the course of 4 years, of which 7 have been WMF employees and 11 have been WMDE employees, though the project has had no “official” support from either organization. Counting forks we have 12 WMF employees and 16 WMDE employees.

Due to the nature of the project (being setup from a git clone), it is quite hard to figure out how many users it has. We can infer that in the last year, thanks to a custom image that has been required, it has been set up roughly 1200 times, by checking the pull stats of silvanwmde/nginx-proxy.

Github repo settings sync, using the Github cli

May 15, 2021 by addshore

The number of Github repositories that I end up maintaining in one way or another ends up growing week by week. And keeping all of the descriptions and settings up to date in sync can be painful todo by hand.

A little while ago I migrated my addwiki project to use a monorepo, and thus needed to bulk update all of the github repository descriptions. While doing so I made use of the github cli and created a single bash script to let me configure all of the repositories at once.

Assuming you already have the github cli install and configured getting started with this is easy.

The command

The below command is one of many in my bash script for repo configuration. This sets a description, homepage and various other flags that I want to be consistent across repositories.

gh api --method PATCH repos/addwiki/addwiki \
    --field description='Monorepo containing all addwiki libraries, packages and applications'\
    --field homepage='https://addwiki.github.io/'\
    --field has_issues='true'\
    --field has_projects='false'\
    --field has_wiki='false'Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Resizing a qemu image root disk partition

May 26, 2021May 14, 2021 by addshore

Recently I found myself altering some virtual images for loading onto a qemu machine. I wanted to increase the disk space on the root partition, but couldn’t find any straightforward guides. So here is a little guide for future me, and anyone else. Install libguestfs-tools libguestfs is a set of tools for accessing and modifying … Read more

WBStack setting changes, Federated properties, Wikidata entity mapping & more

August 28, 2023May 3, 2021 by addshore

During the first 3 months of 2021, some Wikimedia Deutschland engineers, from the Wikidata / Wikibase team, spent some time working on WBStack as part of an effort to explore the WBaaS (Wikibase as a service) topic during the year, as outlined by the development plan.

We want to make it easier for non-Wikimedia projects to set up Wikibase for the first time and to evaluate the viability of Wikibase as a Service.
Wikibase 2021 Development plan

This has lead to a few new Wikibase features being exposed through the WBStack dashboard for sites that run on the platform. These features are primarily features developed by the Wikibase team in 2020 and 2021. The work also brought some other quality of life improvements for the settings pages.

Here is a quick rundown of what’s new and improved.