cli

mwcli -> a-wikimedia-cli: The start of a rebranding

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Welcome to…. a Wikimedia CLI.

My involvement with what eventually became mwcli goes back to the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna in 2017. I put together mediawiki-docker-dev, or MWDD, to make testing MediaWiki against different combinations of PHP versions, web servers and databases easier. It gradually became a development environment that people used day to day, with a collection of Bash scripts wrapping Docker Compose. I wrote up that early history in 2021.

By May 2020, I was experimenting with a more intentional CLI around it. That prototype was written in PHP using Symfony Console, split the environment into independently controlled service groups, and reduced the number of containers needed at startup. It also made tools such as Composer, Fresh and Quibble easier to use alongside the development environment. The basic idea was still Docker Compose, with a friendlier way to manage all the moving parts.

Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Release Engineering team was working on a Go-based MediaWiki CLI. I began porting the MWDD functionality into that project in 2020, with the work continuing through 2021. This brought the development environment into a tool that could be distributed as a single binary, with built-in help, automated tests and regular releases. By November 2021, I could finally point existing MWDD users towards its new home under mw docker.

The wider Wikimedia scope was already starting to appear then. Alongside the development environment, mwcli had commands for GitLab, Gerrit, Codesearch and Toolhub. When I looked back at its usage in January 2025, the development environment still accounted for most recorded activity. But the ambition was to make the CLI useful across more MediaWiki and Wikimedia workflows, and I ended that post wondering whether a rename should accompany a rework, restructure and refocus.

Which brings us to a Wikimedia CLI. The development environment remains a substantial part of the project, but there is now more to discover around Wikimedia data, Toolforge, Cloud VPS and working with wiki content. After several iterations of the tooling—and quite a few years of carrying names from earlier ones—it feels like a good time to start making that broader direction more visible.

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A first look at Docker AI Sandboxes for GitHub Copilot

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With local AI agents increasingly writing and executing code autonomously, giving them unrestricted access to your machine is becoming a massive security risk. This is one of the primary reasons that agentic flows have so many flavors of approval that may need to happen throughout an agents course of action, though others include review points and being able to keep the agent on track.

I have been very much enjoying my increased use of GitHub Cloud Agents in my work and play, which is rather powerful if you can setup your entire stack (more or less accurately) in a remote environment using VMs and containers. On the project that I currently work the most I have a copilot-setup-steps.yaml file or 53 lines leveraging my existing docker compose based development environment setup of 41 services that only takes 2 minutes to “install” (multi repo clones, and dependency installation), then allowing agent to run various different development configurations depending on the tasks at hand, using a mixture of the services (or not).

However today is the first day I’ll be taking a very brief look at Docker AI Sandboxes, to try and do more of this locally and or on machines nearby…

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mwcli (a MediaWiki focused command line tool targeting developers) over the years

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mcwli includes the third of so generation of “developer environments” that I have made for MediaWiki over the years. You can see the backstory in this earlier post.

Since the early days of 2022, there has been optional metric collection included within the mwcli tool.

This metric collection simply collects what command you run, and when you run it (without any parameters or inputs) so that the data can be aggregated, and the various commands usage can be graphed.

Each command run includes something like:

Commanddocker mediawiki exec
DateTime2025-01-07T12:45:18.213Z
Version0.25.1

I used to have live (ish) graphs in the Wikimedia Superset installation, however, the queries there appear to fail now. So I took some time to export the dataset as a CSV, and shove it around a bit in a Python notebook.

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Automatic cobra command registration with fx

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Cobra is a popular Go package for creating CLIs. It provides a lot of functionality for creating commands, subcommands, and flags. However, it can be tedious to manually register all of your commands.

fx is a Go package that provides a dependency injection framework. It can be used to automatically register your application components, including but not limited to Cobra commands.

In this blog post, I will show you how you can use fx to automatically register your Cobra commands.

This code was written 5 minutes ago, but works, and I imagine it could help folks bootstrap more complex CLIs rapidly.

The problem

When you create a Cobra command, you need to manually register it with the root command. This can be tedious, especially if you have a lot of commands.

For example, the following code registers a command called hello:

func NewHelloCmd() *cobra.Command {
  cmd := &cobra.Command{
    Use:   "hello",
    Short: "Say hello",
    Run: func(cmd *cobra.Command, args []string) {
      cmd.Println("Hello, world!")
    },
  }
  return cmd
}

func main() {
  rootCmd := &cobra.Command{
    Use:   "myapp",
    Short: "My application",
  }
  rootCmd.AddCommand(NewHelloCmd())
  rootCmd.Execute()
}Code language: Go (go)

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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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