Manual:How to make a MediaWiki skin

If you are familiar with the front end technologies of CSS, JavaScript and JSON you can make a MediaWiki skin. It will help if you are familiar with Mustache templates. MediaWiki supports LESS CSS but is not essential for making skins.

Getting started
To begin making a skin, you have two options.

Option 1 - Fork Example skin
The Example skin https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-skins-Example provides the bare bones implementation of a skin. Clone the repository in your skins folder making sure the folder is called "Example" and add the following to your LocalSettings.php: If all has gone to plan your skin should be available on the Special:Preferences page of your wiki.

Option 2 - Use the skins lab
The skins lab tool allows you to setup a skin with basic CSS and templates. Once you feel comfortable, you can click "download as ZIP" which will compile the necessary boiler plate for your skin. Hopefully the resulting repository is easy to navigate. When you have downloaded the ZIP place it in your mediawiki skins folder and update LocalSettings.php with the following: If all has gone to plan your skin should be available on the Special:Preferences page of your wiki.

Let people know!
Making a skin will be more fun with other people and much easier too! Once you have got something usable, please consider publishing it to Github or Gerrit. Once the code is publicly available, you should create a skin page (make sure you change the title!) to let people know you are open for collaboration!

Setting up a wiki page has many other benefits. You'll be able to handle bug reports in Phabricator or Github issues and receive patches from other volunteers in the MediaWiki community. Somebody should also be able to help you setup translation.

More advanced
More advanced information will provided on an as requested basis. Please ask a question on the talk page to accelerate the addition of documentation!