User:Mooeypoo/VisualEditor Development

Below are the full steps, as I've experienced them multiple times, in setting up a working development environment for MediaWiki and VisualEditor.

Please note that this isn't an installation guide, this article is specifically meant to help contributors set up their system for contributions to MediaWiki core and VisualEditor.

Motivation
Everything in this guide already appears in the various guides online, either in GitHub or in MediaWiki documentation.

However, from my experience, it tends to get a bit confusing to shift from one guide to the other, especially if you're just starting out with this type of development. So, I grouped everything together into one single newbie-friendly tutorial. If you have anything to add to this, feel free.

Assumptions
This guide assumes the user is working with a Linux-based system. I will concentrate on Debian / Ubuntu because that's the most beginner-friendly distribution out there, but each step also has information about other distributions.

If your system is Windows, I recommend either using MediaWiki-Vagrant or install Linux under a Virtual Machine. VirtualBox or VMWare Player both work well in my experience. If you go with Vagrant, ignore this guide and follow the vagrant guide instead, it will handle setting up a development environment for MediaWiki and any extensions you set it up with.

Set up git
The best information about installing git is on GitHub documents. To save you the trouble, here it is in sequence for Debian / Ubuntu systems.

Install
$ apt-get install git For other distributions, follow the instructions at the git website.

Set up your details

These details should match the details you signed up to gerrit and wikitech $ git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"

$ git config --global user.email "your_email@example.com"