mwcli – addshore

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

January 25, 2025 by addshore

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:

Command	docker mediawiki exec
DateTime	2025-01-07T12:45:18.213Z
Version	0.25.1

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.

SMWCon 2021, Development environments using containers

December 9, 2021 by addshore

SMWCon 2021 is happening as I write this post. I was invited to give a short talk as part of a MediaWiki and Docker workshop organized by Cindy Cicalese on day 2. As I am writing a month of blog posts I’m going to turn my slides into a more digestible and searchable online blog post.

The original slides can still be found on Google Slides, and when the conference recording is up you should find it on the associated event page.

Disclaimer

mediawiki-docker-dev was created at a hackathon Wikimedia Deutschland paid for me to attend
mediawiki-docker-dev CLI experimentation was done in my Wikimedia Deutschland working time
The mwcli tool is owned by the WMF Release engineering time (mediawiki.org, gitlab)
My mediawiki-docker-dev port to mwcli was done in my volunteer time
WBStack was created by me in my volunteer time
WBaaS will be run by WMDE in 2021

mediawiki-docker-dev in mwcli

December 2, 2021November 4, 2021 by addshore

The original mediawiki-docker-dev environment was created by accident and without much design back in 2017.

In 2020 I started working on a new branch with some intentional design and quite liked the direction.

And now finally, the all of the mediawiki-docker-dev functionality exists in a new home, with more intentional design, tests, stability, releases and more.

I’ve already written a brief history of the tool in a previous post so now I’ll focus on what mediawiki-docker-dev looks like in the mwcli environment for the current version 0.8.0.

mwcli CI in Wikimedia GitLab (docker in docker)

April 2, 2022November 1, 2021 by addshore

mwcli is a golang CLI tool that I have been working on over the past year to replace the mediawiki-docker-dev development environment that I accidently created a few years back (among other things). I didn’t start the CLI, but I did this mediawiki-docker-dev like functionality.

As some point through the development journey it became clear that one of the ways to set the new and old environments apart would be through some rigorous CI and testing.

This started with CI running on a Qemu node as part of the shared Wikimedia Jenkins CI infrastructure that is hooked up to Gerrit, where the code was being developed. This ended up being quite slow, and involved lots of manual steps.

A next iteration saw the majority of development take place in my own fork on Github, making use of Github Actions. Changes would then be copied over to Gerrit for final review once CI tests had run.

And finally the repository moved to the new Wikimedia GitLab instance (work in progress), where I could make use of GitLab Runners powered by a machine in Wikimedia Cloud VPS.

Screenshot of GitLab pipelines in action for the mwcli project

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.