Canasta

Canasta is a distribution of MediaWiki designed to make installation, maintenance, upgrading and data structure setup as simple as possible. It is structured as a Docker image, although it is possible that, in the future, it will be installable through other means as well.

Features of Canasta include:
 * A Docker image containing MediaWiki as well as an entire LAMP (Linux (Debian), Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack
 * A large set of extensions (around 150) and skins (around 10) that together represent an attempt at a "best practices" bundle
 * Running wikis via either Docker Compose or Kubernetes
 * A command-line interface (CLI), with the command "canasta", that allows for setup, update, and stopping and starting Canasta-based wikis
 * A set of data structures, installable via the Page Exchange extension, to enable standard use cases like project management

History
Canasta began with Project Canasta, a project begun in late 2020 to create a framework for MediaWiki-based "products" that would be easy to install, and would support one or more tasks like project management, customer relationship management, quality management, etc. In May 2021, it was officially decided to go with Docker for this new distribution/framework, and an informal consortium was created between three companies (MyWikis, WikiTeq and WikiWorks) to create it. An initial version was created, based on an internal Docker image in use by WikiTeq.

In late 2021, it was decided to give this (still unnamed) distribution the same name as its project: Canasta. Canasta was officially announced at EMWCon in April 2022, along with its first release and its website, at https://canasta.wiki.

In February 2023, version 1.3 of Canasta was released, now upgraded to MediaWiki 1.39.

Code

 * Canasta Docker image
 * Canasta stack for Docker Compose
 * Canasta stack for Kubernetes
 * Canasta CLI

Presentations

 * Canasta presentation, SMWCon Fall 2021
 * Canasta presentation, EMWCon Spring 2022
 * Canasta presentation, SMWCon Fall 2022 (video)
 * Canasta presentation, EMWCon Spring 2023 (video)