Manual:Writing maintenance scripts

Version 1.16 of MediaWiki introduced the maintenance class () to make it easier to write command-line MediaWiki maintenance scripts.

This is written as a step-by-step tutorial.

Example Script
To describe writing these maintenance scripts, we'll walk through an helloWorld.php, a script that simply prints “Hello, World”. This program contains the minimum amount of code needed to run as well as the expected copyright header (for alternative headers, see headers>Special:MyLanguage/copyright headers|copyright headers):

The program will just print out “Hello, World!” but already has a --help (and other command line options). Sample output:

 $ php helloWorld.php Hello, World! $ php helloWorld.php --help

Usage: php helloWorld.php [--conf|--dbpass|--dbuser|--globals|--help|--quiet|--wiki] conf : Location of LocalSettings.php, if not default dbpass : The password to use for this script dbuser : The DB user to use for this script globals : Output globals at the end of processing for debugging help : Display this help message quiet : Whether to supress non-error output wiki : For specifying the wiki ID

An overview:


 * Line 12


 * Of course, if we're going to write a maintenance script, we have to include Maintenance.php. This takes care of setting up Autoloading and the like.  It is best to use the full path to Maintenance.php.


 * Line 14


 * We override Maintenance class and then, in


 * Line 20 & 21


 * tell the Maintenance class to run the script using the HelloWorld class, only if being executed from the command line.


 * Line 15
 * The execute function that we've provided is executed.

Option and Argument Parsing
Greeting the world is all well and good, but we want to be able to greet individuals, too.

To add a command-line option, add a constructor to  that calls  's   and update the   method to use the new option. 's parameters are, so:

This time, when executed, the output of the helloWorld.php</tt> script changes depending on the argument provided:

<pre style="overflow:auto;"> $ php helloWorld.php Hello, World! $ php helloWorld.php --name=Mark Hello, Mark! $ php helloWorld.php --help Usage: php helloWorld.php [--conf|--dbpass|--dbuser|--globals|--help|--name|--quiet|--wiki] …   name : Who to say Hello to