How to become a MediaWiki hacker

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This article is written to help novice developers learn the skills needed to contribute to MediaWiki development.

If you are an experienced developer, visit the developer hub instead.

Overview

MediaWiki is the software that powers Wikipedia, its sister projects and thousands of wikis all over the world. It runs on most operating systems, is written in PHP, primarily uses the MySQL database server and uses jQuery as the client Javascript library. Development of MediaWiki is primarily supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, though volunteer community developers play a huge part as well.

This page should help you get started on the path to becoming a contributor to MediaWiki. It is not a tutorial; it just points you to various places where you can go learn whatever is necessary.

Prerequisites

PHP

MediaWiki is written in PHP, so it's pretty much mandatory to be familiar with PHP if you intend to do any kind of coding on MediaWiki.

Learn PHP
  • PHP tutorial — Available in many different languages. If you have no knowledge of PHP but know how to program in other object-oriented programming languages, PHP will be easy for you to learn.
  • PHP Programming at Wikibooks.
PHP resources
Stuff to know
  • The script maintenance/eval.php in MediaWiki provides a basic PHP interpreter with MediaWiki objects and classes loaded.

Database

Many features require some amount of database manipulation, so you'll often need to be familiar with MySQL.

Learn MySQL
MySQL resources
Stuff to know
  • Test your code with MySQL.
    MediaWiki currently uses MySQL as the primary database back-end. It also supports other DBMSes, such as PostgreSQL and SQLite. However, almost all developers use MySQL and don't test other DBs, which consequently break on a regular basis. You're therefore advised to use MySQL when testing patches, unless you're specifically trying to improve support for another DB. In the latter case, make sure you're careful not to break MySQL (or write queries that are horribly inefficient in it), since that's what everybody else uses.
  • Preserve MySQL 4.0 support when possible.
    Although the Wikimedia Foundation has now moved on from MySQL 4.0, it's important to not intentionally break MySQL 4.0 support. MySQL 4.0 is missing a lot of features of later MySQL versions (never mind other DBMSes): if you aren't sure, double-check in the manual first! The most commonly used feature missing from MySQL 4.0 is subqueries; don't use those outside of code specific to a non-MySQL DBMS.

JavaScript and CSS

JavaScript and CSS have become omnipresent in front-end code. You don't have to be familiar with JavaScript, jQuery and CSS to work on MediaWiki, but you might need to, depending on what you choose to work on.

Learn JavaScript and CSS
JavaScript and CSS resources

MediaWiki

The MediaWiki code base is large and ugly; don't be overwhelmed by it. When you're first starting off, aim to write features or fix bugs which are constrained to a small region of code.

MediaWiki primers and must-reads
MediaWiki resources

Set up your environment

It's not necessary to download Wikipedia database dumps in order to develop MediaWiki features. In fact, in many cases it's easier to use a near-empty database with a few specially-crafted test pages. However, if for some reason you want to have a copy of Wikipedia, you can get a dump.

Get started

The two main paths to get started with MediaWiki development are to fix an annoying little bug in the existing code, or to add a new feature, usually through a MediaWiki extension.

MediaWiki extensions primers
MediaWiki extensions resources

Submit your changes

  • Make your changes against the trunk in Subversion, not a branch.
  • Check your code against the pre-commit checklist. Don't skip this step; you'll be happy you didn't.
  • Create a unified diff of the modified file:
svn diff path/to/modified_file.php > my.patch
If you need help with this step, try this training tutorial.
  • Post your patch as an attachment to the appropriate bug report in Bugzilla, and mark it with the patch and need-review keywords.
    Feel free to ping the Bugmeister if you see that your patch isn't reviewed and committed. This can be a slower process than just committing it yourself, but by doing it once or twice you demonstrate your good faith, and your ability to write reasonably stable code.
  • If your patches have been accepted by the community, and you want to continue your involvement with MediaWiki, request commit access to commit future changes yourself.

Discuss and get help

MediaWiki has a very friendly, large and diverse community. There are multiple places to get help. If you already have an idea for a feature you want to implement, it's also a good idea to talk to a senior developer before you start, especially if you're not sure how your feature will affect other parts of the code.

  • IRC — Specifically, the #mediawikiconnect channel. The MediaWiki developer community is distributed around the world, and there most likely is someone awake, no matter what your timezone is. Hop in and start talking.
  • Mailing Lists — Since you are looking to be a developer, wikitech-l is where you should be at. You can also browse through the archives to get a feel of how the community operates.

See also

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