User:Kmenger/Tool Labs

TODO for improvingTool Labs documentation 

Questions and initial notes, with some additional notes from July 15 meeting

- Would love to add a more detailed overview (features, rationale, basic architecture,open-source rule, etc) as an introduction, based on this really helpful presentation:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Tool_Labs_presentation_(Hackaton_2013).pdf. High-level examples of tools and bots (e.g., edit counter/ edit bot) and where one encounters them was also very helpful to me.

[Add overview here: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Tools]

- I don’t fully understand the difference between tools and toolsbeta. What types of development would go where? How do I choose which project to use? Are there different ways of accessing each? Are there things that should go on one, andnot the other?

-The instructions for creating a key/requesting account are very helpful! I got confused when I tried to ssh in.

-The instructions say 24 hours or less to process a Tool Labs account request. I waited about 24 hours before asking for help on IRC. Not sure how long the turn-around would have been had I not.

-What are the rules for using bots? I wondered this and was/am worried about running mybot/changing anything. I would have appreciated some advice on this matter.

MORE INFO:http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Botand Wikipedia bot approval group for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_Approvals_Group

-Add a 'Contact us' section with  irc/mailing list/bugzilla info. Any other points of contact?

-This info is in powerpoint slides, but not the guide, I believe, but it seems important to note: 'There are two bastionhosts: Ssh://tools-login.wmflabs.org Ssh://tools-dev.wmflabs.org This is whereusers log in and do their thing. They are functionally identical, but we request that heavy processing nottake place on –login (compiles, etc) to keepinteractive performance snappy.'

-Can you commit code to git via gerrit? If so, how? Magnus notes that WMF Labs does not offer aneasy-to-use code repository and offers other suggestions: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/Migrating_from_toolserver#GIT Is there a recommended way/set up?

-Creating a new tool account. Seems there are two ways to do this: From Tool Labs Webpage> Create tool Or from https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:NovaProject>add service group. Are there any differences between these? Can a new tool account only be created via the web interface?

-Am thinking it would be helpful to add an “Accessing Tool Labs section” to consolidate the info about this (web, ssh, putty/winscp, sftp<—a user mentions that this worksand is currently undocumented)

-The first thing I encountered/wondered about when I accessed my account was the replica.my.cnf file. I figured out what it is/how it is used from the database access section, butI also liked the idea of mentioning this information in the ‘creating a new tool account’ section as that is the first place I looked.

-Thinking that itmight be nice to create a section along the lines of ‘Configuring a tool account’ with info about creating a tool description/webpage, mail, adding/removing users, etc. some of this info is in the doc, but it gets a little lost in sections dedicated to other topics.

-Russell Blau’s Using pywikibot on Labs doc is really helpful! https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Russell_Blau/Using_pywikibot_on_Labs Are there other common tool set ups that could/should be documented?

-That said, re:Blau, although I was able to successfully set a path variable, create a sub-directoryin my home directory for bot-related files, add my user-config.pyfile, and runa test (step 1-4) I wasn’t able to run my simple test bot, which is (sans all paths): pythonpwb.py basic-dry User:KBot500

I tried several ways (e.g., with fully qualified path to pwb.py (e.g.,/shared/pywikipedia/rewrite/pwb.py), full paths to both pwb and basic. I experimented with the symbolic link as well. I managed to run the bot from my local machine, with the user-config.py I added to Tool Labs.

-I haven’t yet been able to test out the grid access. Are there some bots/tools that I can practice with/look at? If so, what’s the best way to get these? A shared ‘Test’ Tools account or something along those lines? Something else? I'd love to see examples of bots that one would run continuously, and tools that create/access databases in different ways.

**** This is as far as I’ve gotten in using tool labs. More as it comes!

Feedback on bots installing/configuring, and running pywikibot:

-the python on my mac laptop (approx.. three years old) was too old for pywikibot. Not just pc that might need to download python!

-the magic keywords in the presentation are incomplete. I found the full set in an older version of the presentation:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/archive/9/9b/20130526081606%21Bots_hackathon_2013.pdf