How to become a MediaWiki hacker

This article is written to help developers learn the basic skills needed to contribute to development of MediaWiki core and MediaWiki extensions.

The main path to get started with Wikimedia development is to contribute to Wikimedia projects that offer mentoring. An alternative without mentoring is to fix a good first bug.

If you are an experienced developer who is familiar with using MediaWiki already, visit the  instead.

For other ways to get involved in the Wikimedia community, see .

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

Although MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language, some supporting tools are written in other languages, including batch files, shell scripts, makefiles and Python. 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 or 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,  , and IRC channels.  The main developer list is wikitech-l.  The main developer IRC channels are  and.


 * Source code is stored on and managed using the Git revision control system and can be viewed here


 * Code review is performed on and can be viewed here.  Follow this tutorial to set up Git and Gerrit in order to submit patches.


 * Bug reports and feature requests are filed, and projects are coordinated on and can be viewed here

Set up your development environment
You can install and develop MediaWiki on Linux, Windows, or macOS using any of the three solutions below.

Most projects use Git and Gerrit. Follow the Gerrit tutorial to set up your developer account. Then you can move on to downloading our code, making changes, testing them, and submitting patches. There are two ways to set up your development environment: using a pre-configured virtual machine setup (Docker or Vagrant), or a manual configuration approach.

Docker

 * MediaWiki Docker – Run MediaWiki using Docker.

You can also try the experimental mwcli tool which sets up Docker with a few simple commands and provides basic orchestration functionality for MediaWiki Docker containers. With this you can easily add extensions and features to your container.

If you run it from Windows, Docker shares files between your Windows filesystem and the container filesystem. This can cause MediaWiki to be very slow if you are using WSL2 based engine, due to the poor performance of its shared directory implementation. If you have Windows Pro, you can switch to the Hyper-V backend on the setting of Docker Desktop for better filesystem performance.

An even faster way to run MediaWiki using Docker in Windows (speeds comparable to manually installing) is to clone MediaWiki and run Docker from WSL (or install and run  inside of WSL). That way there is no shared filesystem overhead. To develop the MediaWiki codebase that is inside the Docker container you can establish a remote connection to it and open the MediaWiki WSL folder in that is in the container using VSCode or PhpStorm.

Vagrant

 * MediaWiki Vagrant – Run MediaWiki on a Linux virtual machine using Vagrant.

Vagrant allows you start a MediaWiki instance you can develop as well as allowing you to add and develop any of 250+ extensions - all with a single command. This saves you installation and configuration time compared to manually installing. It runs faster than Docker on Windows, however slower than Docker on WSL or manually installing.

Manual installation
MediaWiki can be developed by installing it natively on your system and editing its code. Installing it natively means it will run faster than Docker or Vagrant, but it will take more time to configure.


 * 1)  — Check hardware requirements and install dependencies
 * 2)  — Download the latest source code from Git.
 * 3)  — Continue with the installation and initial configuration.
 * 4) Set up the various debug modes in your environment to display warning and errors early.

PHP
MediaWiki is written in PHP, so you'll need to get familiar with PHP to hack MediaWiki's core.


 * 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 at Wikiversity.


 * PHP resources :
 * The PHP manual — Available in many different languages.
 * PHP coding conventions within the MediaWiki community.


 * Stuff to know :
 * The script  in MediaWiki provides a basic PHP interpreter with MediaWiki objects and classes loaded.
 * Also, the script in MediaWiki is a replacement of  based on PsySH, see

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


 * Learn MySQL/MariaDB
 * MySQL tutorial — From the MySQL reference manual.
 * MySQL at Wikibooks.


 * MySQL/MariaDB resources
 * MySQL Reference Manuals — Available in many different languages.
 * MariaDB Knowledge Base
 * Database coding conventions within the MediaWiki community.


 * Stuff to know :
 * Test your code with MySQL/MariaDB.
 * MediaWiki currently uses MySQL and MariaDB as the primary database back-end. It also supports other DBMSes, such as PostgreSQL and SQLite.  However, almost all developers use MySQL/MariaDB and don't test other DBs, which consequently break on a regular basis.  You're therefore advised to use MySQL/MariaDB 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/MariaDB (or write queries that are horribly inefficient in it), since MySQL/MariaDB is what everybody else uses.

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 at Wikibooks.
 * Getting Started with jQuery — A jQuery tutorial.
 * Learning JavaScript — references and sources.


 * JavaScript and CSS resources
 * JavaScript coding conventions within the MediaWiki community.
 * CSS coding conventions within the MediaWiki community.

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


 * MediaWiki basics and must-reads :
 *  — A high-level overview of the main components of MediaWiki and how they work with each other.
 *  — An overview of why and how to write secure code.


 * MediaWiki resources :
 * — A list of important files and links to more detailed information.
 * — A list of hooks. If you're trying to find what part of the codebase does something, often a good place to start is by searching for the related hooks.
 * — An overview of general coding conventions within the MediaWiki community.


 * Code documentation ( class reference ) — Automatically generated documentation from the code and code comments.
 * — A guide to debugging MediaWiki.
 * — A tool to interact with MediaWiki objects live.

MediaWiki extensions
If you choose to work on MediaWiki extensions code, the following links provide more information.


 * MediaWiki extensions basics:
 * Developing extensions — How to write an extension for MediaWiki.
 * Extension writing tutorial


 * MediaWiki extensions resources:
 * Best practices for extensions
 * [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zlGo-hrnt8 A brief introduction to MediaWiki extension development] — A video presentation about how to create a MediaWiki extension ([ https://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2011-_A_brief_introduction_to_MediaWiki_extension_development.pdf slides]).
 * [ https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/File:Hacking_mediawiki.pdf Making a MediaWiki extension] — Covers how to develop an extension for MediaWiki, best practices, and how to engage the MediaWiki community. From February 2011.
 * Help for extension developers on the Developer Hub