Developer hub

This is a high-level overview of MediaWiki development, including links to the key documents, resources and tools available to MediaWiki developers. It is written for skilled LAMP developers who have experience using MediaWiki.


 * If you want to use Wikimedia web APIs, visit Web APIs hub (work in progress).
 * If you want to contribute to developing Wikimedia software, see New Developers.
 * For an introductory guide to developing MediaWiki and MediaWiki extensions, read howto>Special:MyLanguage/How to become a MediaWiki hacker|How to become a MediaWiki hacker.
 * If you want to collaborate with other third-party MediaWiki users, the  (MWStake) is a MediaWiki 2>Special:MyLanguage/Groups|user group consisting of MediaWiki developers, system administrators, users, consultants, and hosting providers.

Overview
MediaWiki is the software that powers Wikipedia, its sister projects and thousands of wikis all over the world.

MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language.

It uses jQuery as the client JavaScript library.

MediaWiki is primarily written for the LAMP platform and runs on most operating systems. MediaWiki primarily uses the MySQL and MariaDB database servers.

Development happens in an open source style, is largely coordinated online, and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, though volunteer community developers play a huge part as well.


 * Development discussion happens on various mailing lists and IRC channels. The main developer list is wikitech-l. The main developer IRC channels are #mediawiki and #wikimedia-dev.


 * Source code is managed using the Git version control system.


 * Code review for most projects is performed on . Follow this tutorial to set up Git and Gerrit in order to submit patches.


 * Bug reports and tasks for most projects are managed on Phabricator.


 * Developers extending or interfacing with MediaWiki (instead of working on the core code) have several convenient extension points, including the api>Special:MyLanguage/API:Main page|API, the  system and skins>Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Skins|Skins – see the ext>#Extending MediaWiki|#Extending MediaWiki section of this page for an overview.

Extending MediaWiki
MediaWiki has been designed to allow for modification without changing the "core code". This makes it easy to update to a new version of MediaWiki without having to manually merge in old extension code changes. There are six main extension points that allow developers to change or extend what MediaWiki can do. The extension points are:


 * api>Special:MyLanguage/API:Action API|API – access the data and metadata of MediaWiki instances through its web API.
 *  – every time a given event happens, do something.
 *  – create a new command like:.
 *  – change the look and feel of MediaWiki.
 *  – add a new special page.
 *  – create a new tag like:.
 *  – add a parser hook to modify the content of wikitext.