development

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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Wikibase Repository development environment (mwcli)

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This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Wikibase Entities

Back in 2022, while working at Wikimedia Germany, I ran two sessions with people from the Wikibase Stakeholder Group, focused on Ecosystem Enablement.

These sessions were video recorded and documented in quite a lot of detail, but following through with the videos would probably lead to a bit of a drawn out experience, as they were focused around a workshop setting with participants following along.

  • Session 1, 2022-04-28: Using mwcli, loading extensions, understanding Mediawiki’s general extension mechanism (Video, Overview)
  • Session 2, 2022-05-24: Running your first extension, Wikibase stable interface policy, Mediawiki hooks, building a new API function (Video, Overview)

In this post, I will focus on the core steps required to get a MediaWiki and Wikibase Repository development environment setup in a few minutes with mwcli, and will serve as a basis for some blog posts that I will be writing in the future.

Getting mwcli

If you head to the home page of mwcli, you’ll see a link to an installation guide.

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Autoreload go code on code change

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For developers, the ability to autoreload code upon any changes is nothing short of a game-changer. It not only streamlines the development process but also fosters an environment of continuous improvement and experimentation.

There are so many packages for languages such as JavaScript for such a behaviour, but I struggled to easily find a simple-to-use go version with an example.

And that’s where this post comes in, as a simple to-the-point example extracted from what I learnt while reading https://dev.to/jacobsngoodwin/full-stack-memory-app-01-setup-go-server-with-reload-in-docker-62n

We will be making use of https://github.com/cespare/reflex, which is a go package and small tool to watch a directory and rerun a command when certain files change. 

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Small commits

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There are many blog posts and articles out there about making small git commits. I’m sure most people (including me) bring up the same few topics around why small commits are good and why we should all probably be making smaller commits.

In this post, I’ll look at some of the key topics from my perspective, and try to tie these topics to concrete examples from repositories that I have worked on. The topics are in no particular order, so be sure to give them all a read.

One thing to note is that “small” doesn’t necessarily mean small in terms of lines of code. Small here is also relative. Also, small commits can benefit you in many different places, but to stand the test of time they must end up in your main branch.

Git features during development

Git only takes full responsibility for your data when you commit

Commit Often, Perfect Later, Publish Once: Git Best Practices

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