Parsoid/Developer Setup

This page describes installation of from source. This is primarily useful for developers of Parsoid, but if there are not prebuilt packages of Parsoid for your operating system, you might also find this useful.

Quick start
For backwards compatibility, and to continue supporting non-static configs, can be  configured as follows:

See for more details on the "edit config.yaml" and "edit localsettings.js" steps. See the Gerrit 'getting started' docs for more help with "git review", which is only necessary if you plan to contribute code changes back to us.

If the above commands don't immediately make sense to you, keep reading for more detailed instructions.

Ensure you have a recent node
Before you install Parsoid, you should ensure that you've got a recent version of [ https://nodejs.org/ node] installed.

Parsoid requires node v 6.x or higher, and we run v 6.9.1 in production.

If you do not have new-enough node installed, follow the instructions at and then come back here.

Option 1. Clone the mediawiki/services/parsoid/deploy repository
This is perhaps the simplest way to install Parsoid if you just want to play around for a bit and not have to deal with npm install.

This installs the version of Parsoid that is currently deployed in production alongwith all the node dependencies. The parsoid code itself will be in the src/ subdirectory. The npm modules will be in the node_modules/ subdirectory.

Option 2. Clone the mediawiki/services/parsoid repository
You can install the Parsoid code anywhere, it doesn't have to be installed or run as the root user.

Checkout the sources:

Or if you plan to hack Parsoid, follow the the Gerrit 'getting started' docs and set up  in your new checkout. (This will also create an authenticated remote named  in your repository.)

Check your version of node: type  (or   on Debian/Ubuntu) and it should print. (Higher is fine, too.) See if that's not right.

Install the JS dependencies.

Run this command in the Parsoid directory (containing ):

Configuration
If you would like to point the Parsoid web service to your own wiki, go to the  directory and edit the   file.

Use  parameter to point to the MediaWiki instance(s) you want to use like this:

If you would like to point the Parsoid web service to your own wiki using  file in the   file uncomment the   path like this:

and comment,   and   parameters like this:

go to the  directory and create a   file based on. Use  to point to the MediaWiki instance(s) you want to use like this:

You can then access pages of your wiki in Parsoid with the relative URL '/yoursite.com/v3/page/html/&lt;page-title&gt;/'

See for more details.

Run the server
You should be able to start the Parsoid web service from the parsoid directory using:

and on ubuntu 14.04 type this in /parsoid directory.

This will start the Parsoid HTTP service, its default in localsettings.js is to listen on port 8000. To test it, point your browser to http://localhost:8000/. If you configured Parsoid correctly, you should be able to parse pages via. Note that this test might also fail, in the case your hosting provider has disabled port 8000 for your account.

Two environment variables are available to control binding to a specific interface and/or port:

Starting the Parsoid service automatically
There are many ways to start services automatically, consult your server's operating system documentation.

Upstart (Ubuntu)
On Ubuntu and other operating systems using Upstart, one approach is

where  contains configuration similar to  's  :

To test your configuration type

If the answer is "syntax ok" you can start the service:

To check, if the service is running, type

And if you want to stop your node.js-parsoid-server you can do this with

You can find more helpful instructions to get node running as server with ubuntu in this article: The Upstart Event System: What It Is And How To Use It

Fedora
On recent versions of Fedora and other operating systems using systemd, use a parsoid.service unit file similar to the following template (modify the file paths as appropriate):

The optional  directive above can specify the path to a file similar to the following template:

You can also use PM2 to daemonize the server.js application.

Install using npm:

Start server.js through PM2:

The parsoid server is now running and managed by PM2. Save the process list:

Now whenever PM2 starts the parsoid server application will run and be managed by PM2. The final step is to have PM2 automatically start on system boot:

For later Ubuntu releases that use systemd use this as the [platform] rather than 'ubuntu'.

See bug T69313 for packaging plans that should make the general installation easier.

Automatically Starting on macOS
On macOS, you can create a plist. This is an example of a suitable plist (adapt the parsoid and config.yaml paths to your system):

Save it as org.mediawiki.parsoid.start.plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons and change to root user & wheel group, correct permissions, and add it as a persistent launchd job (so that it will restart on the next reboot).

Passenger
This is probably not recommended. If using passenger, make sure that num_workers in config.yaml is set to 0, otherwise it won't bind to passenger 's socket properly.

Gentoo Linux, Funtoo Linux
Add a config.yaml file in the install location ( /usr/lib64/node_modules/parsoid ), see example file.

As an init.d file, supposing that node is installed in its default location and parsoid installed system-wide (npm install -g)

A better idea would be to run Parsoid without root permissions. Let's create unprivileged system account:

And our init.d script would change accordingly (assuming default locations, system-wide installation):

FreeBSD
startup script from https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/4ft79b/best_practice_for_daemonizing_nodejs/d2earq1/

Windows setup
These steps are the same as the installation of Parsoid on Linux:

git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/services/parsoid cd parsoid npm install

If npm install fails due to npm being an unknown command, try to add the nodesjs folder to the PATH, as explained earlier in the Install prerequisite software section, and run npm install directly from the parsoid folder created by the git clone command.

If the installation fails again, you may try to disable your router firewall.

When the installation is complete, configure parsoid and run (server.js might be located in the folder bin\ and not in api\ in newer versions of Parsoid):

node bin\server.js

To run parsoid in the background, create a cmd file in the parsoid directory called parsoid.bat. Setup a scheduled task to run the task on startup. Alternatively several "run batch file as a service" commands exist on the internet.

@echo off "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\nodejs\node.exe" bin\server.js

When using the cmd file as scheduled task it might be required to use the full path to the server.js file (e.g. C:\www\parsoid\bin\server.js) instead of bin\server.js.

Git will fail to download if you have a corporate proxy to go through, so you need to do the following first;

git config --global -e

This will launch an editor now press i once in insert mode type;

[http] proxy = http://proxy.company.com:8080

Now finally press ESC and then type :wq and press enter to save changes. Proxy is now enabled.

Windows Server 2008 R2
MediaWiki must be installed, and an extension Visual Editor as well.

Troubleshooting
If things are still not working, then see our troubleshooting page.