Year: 2021

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

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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.

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WBStack Infrastructure

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WBStack is a platform allowing shared scalable hosting of Wikibase and surrounding services.

A year ago I made an initial post covering the state of WBStack infrastructure. Since then some things have changed, and I have also had more time to create a clear diagram. So it is time for the 2021 edition.

WBStack currently runs on a single Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine cluster, now made up of 3 virtual machines, one e2-standard-2 and two e2-medium. This results in roughly 4 vCPUs and 12GB of allocatable memory.

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Twitter bot powered by Github Actions (WikidataMeter)

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Recently 2 new Twitter bots appeared in my feed, fullyjabbed & fullyjabbedUK, created by iamdanw and powered entirely by Github Actions (code).

I have been thinking about writing a Twitter bot for some time and decided to copy this pattern running a cron based Twitter bot on Github Actions, with an added bit of free persistence using jsonstorage.net.

This post if my quick walkthrough of my new bot, WikidataMeter, what it does and how it works. You can find the code version when writing this blog post here, and the current version here.

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If you bake 2 lasagnes, and stack them, do you have 1 or 2 lasagnes?

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This is the question that I asked a group of around 50 people this evening as part of a food for thought exercise. 37 replied before I decided to write this blog post, and here is a quick summary…

The question was “If you bake 2 lasagnes, and then put one on top of the other, do you have 1 or 2 lasagnes?”

The answers ranged dramatically, and the group was fairly divided, but slightly leaning toward an answer of 1, with ~24 saying that you have 1 lasagne, and ~10 saying 2 lasagnes. Some of the answers were a bit vague and hard to stick into one of these categories.

Word cloud of the responses

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VSCode & PHP XDebug from Localhost, WSL2 and Docker containers

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VSCode seems to be one of the up and coming IDEs over the last year. I personally switched from Jetbrains IDEs to VSCode fo most of my development work at some point in 2020.

Apparently up until now I have avoided running the PHP debugger Xdebug. I had to do a little search around to figure out the correct settings for my setup decided to write them down in this handy blog post.

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dockerit v0.0.5 (Easier than docker run)

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dockerit is a small CLI tool that I have been working on during the start of 2021. It’s intended to make running one off commands and CLI tooling easier in docker. Rather than having to write a long string of parameters for docker run, instead you can just use dockerit. This applies to both CLI usage, but also via bash aliases.

You can download a build binary of dockerit from the Github releases page.

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Testing WDQS Blazegraph data load performance

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Toward the end of 2020 I spent some time blackbox testing data load times for WDQS and Blazegraph to try and find out which possible setting tweaks might make things faster.

I didn’t come to any major conclusions as part of this effort but will write up the approach and data nonetheless incase it is useful for others.

I expect the next step toward trying to make this go faster would be via some whitebox testing, consulting with some of the original developers or with people that have taken a deep dive into the code (which I started but didn’t complete).

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PHP 7 composer docker image digest

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At some point in the last weeks the composer docker image that can be found on docker hub switched from PHP7 to PHP8. Some projects, such as wikibase-docker, still require PHP7 for installation.

It looks like the composer image is not going to be providing an additional tag using a pre PHP 8 version, thus an old digest will be needed.

tldr; here is the digest that you want for composer with PHP7 (tag-details)

docker pull composer@sha256:d374b2e1f715621e9d9929575d6b35b11cf4a6dc237d4a08f2e6d1611f534675

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