MediaWiki Extension Service

This app is a service intended to be run on Wikimedia Tool Labs.

It includes a cron job that fetches the git repositories for a number of MediaWiki extensions and extracts certain bits of metadata about the extension into a database. That metadata is then exposed to a simple HTTP API.

The intended consumer of this API is a cli tool which simplifies the installation and upgrading of MediaWiki extensions.

Setup

Clone the git repository. For now at least this package will not be published to npm.

$ git clone https://github.com/redwerks/mediawiki-extensionservice.git
$ cd mediawiki-extensionservice/

Install the local dependencies and necessary global commands via npm.

sudo may be required for the -g commands if you have not changed ownership of the global directory

# For development
$ npm install
$ npm install -g sequelize-cli
# Or for production
$ npm install --production
$ npm install -g sequelize-cli

Install the database adapter for whatever database software you intend to use.

$ npm install sqlite3 # sqlite
$ npm install mysql # mysql
$ npm install mariasql # mariadb
$ npm install pg pg-hstore # postgres
$ npm install tedious # mssql

Setup a database and configure the service, see Configuration for information on how.

Do a database migration to install the database tables.

$ sequelize db:migrate

See Using for information on how to populate the database and what cron job you need to setup.

Configuration

MediaWiki Extension Service is configured using environment variables. You can pass configuration to the commands directly or store them in an .env file in the cwd.

Storage

A storage directory is necessary for storage of the bare git repositories of extensions that the service clones and fetches.

Note that while the job will re-clone any repository that disappears it is still more efficient to fetch updates if possible. So while it is acceptable for the storage location to be a temporary directory if run in a grid a shared directory should be used so repositories are not re-cloned on every new machine.

STORAGE_DIR=[./path/to/storage]

Database

A database to store extension metadata is required, sequelize is used to manage it.

Sequelize supports sqlite, mysql, mariadb, postgres, and mssql. DATABASE_TYPE is required for all database types. The other required environment variables depend on the database type.

For sqlite the DATABASE_STORAGE environment variable is required.

DATABASE_TYPE=sqlite
DATABASE_STORAGE=[./path/to/db.sqlite]

For all other database types the DATABASE_NAME ,DATABASE_USER, and DATABASE_PASS environment variables are required.

DATABASE_TYPE=[mysql|mariadb|postgres|mssql]
DATABASE_NAME=
DATABASE_HOST=
DATABASE_USER=
DATABASE_PASS=
DATABASE_PORT=

Using

MediaWiki Extension Service's extension metadata extraction is handled by its cron job script.

To run it execute:

$ bin/cron.js

If you are running this repeatedly during development you can pass the --no-fetch argument to skip fetching updates for extensions that have already been cloned.

To run the service in production bin/cron.js must be run periodically as part of a cron job. The service avoids storing any frequently modified data that needs to be kept up to date so once a day should be acceptable.