MediaWiki-Vagrant



MediaWiki-Vagrant is a portable MediaWiki development environment. It consists of a set of configuration scripts for Vagrant and VirtualBox that automate the creation of a virtual machine that runs MediaWiki.

The virtual machine that MediaWiki-Vagrant creates makes it easy to learn about, modify, and improve MediaWiki's code: useful debugging information is displayed by default, and various developer tools are set up specifically for inspecting and interacting with MediaWiki code, including a powerful debugger and an interactive interpreter. Best of all, because the configuration is automated and contained in a virtual environment, mistakes are easy to undo.

Quick start
  Get VirtualBox  Get Vagrant (version 1.2.2 or higher is required!) Get the code and create your machine:  $ git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/vagrant $ cd vagrant $ vagrant up Running Windows? Get Git and run these commands in a Git Bash shell.  When Vagrant is done configuring your machine, browse to http://127.0.0.1:8080/ to find your MediaWiki instance. The admin password is. Linux repositories may provide older versions that are not compatible with MediaWiki-Vagrant. You might want to compare the output of the initial run of  in your terminal with this sample.

Basic usage
The  command-line tool on the host machine provides several subcommands for controlling your virtual machine. You've already used one:, which turns on the virtual machine. Like most  subcommands, you need to run it from the MediaWiki-Vagrant directory or one of its children. When you first run it, Vagrant will fetch a system image and the requisite software for running MediaWiki. This takes around 10-15 minutes on a broadband connection, but it only needs to happen once. When you run  in the future, it'll simply boot up the machine.

starts an interactive login shell on the virtual machine. It'll log you in as the user ; root access is available to via , which is passwordless. Because the virtual machine is entirely sandboxed within your computer, it is configured for convenience, not security. As a rule, whenever you encounter a password prompt, the password is.

When you log in, you should see a colorful MediaWiki banner, and you may be prompted to update the version of VirtualBox Guest Additions. Updating will improve the performance and reliability of your machine, so go ahead and do it, by running.

The command  will start an interactive PHP interpreter with MediaWiki's codebase already loaded. You can type in some code, hit 'enter', and the code will be evaluated immediately. If you start a line with '=', its computed value will be pretty-printed.

The  folder corresponds to the MediaWiki-Vagrant folder on your host machine, and its contents is shared. MediaWiki's code is installed in. This allows you to use your normal editor environment on your host machine to edit the MediaWiki code that runs on your virtual machine.

Log out of your virtual machine by typing  or by pressing. Now that you're back in a standard command prompt, you can run  to shut down the virtual machine and   to bring it back up. will delete the virtual machine's files; this command is useful if you want to return your instance to a pristine state. (You'll need to follow up with  to provision a fresh instance.)

Using roles
MediaWiki-Vagrant sets up a basic MediaWiki instance by default, but it also knows how to configure a range of complementary software, including some popular MediaWiki extensions and their dependencies. These optional software stacks are collectively known as 'roles', and MediaWiki-Vagrant offers an easy and powerful command-line interface for managing them.

 $ vagrant list-roles
 * 1) Display a list of available roles.

 $ vagrant enable-role role
 * 1) Turn on role for this machine.

 $ vagrant disable-role role Watch a short screencast demonstrating how to use roles. /Roles has more information about some roles. If you add many roles, you may need to increase memory available to the Vagrant VM. In particular, setting up the "browsertests" role involves compiling the  ruby Gem which is a memory-hungry task; if it fails try freeing some memory in the VM or increasing its memory allocation.
 * 1) Turn off role for this machine.

See the section Authoring roles below if you're interested in adding roles to MediaWiki-Vagrant.

How do I...?

 * Edit LocalSettings.php?
 * Edit  on the host machine or virtual machine.


 * Update MediaWiki code?
 * Just use regular git fetch, pull , etc. commands in  and   directories. MediaWiki-Vagrant pulls code from git master when you initially set up and/or add a role, but doesn't automatically update code after that.


 * Add custom Puppet code?
 * Place your custom Puppet manifests in . Puppet will automatically apply any .pp files that it finds in that directory.


 * Customize Vagrantfile, but still be able to pull changes from upstream?
 * Rather than override the values defined in Vagrantfile, simply create a file called Vagrantfile-extra.rb and place it in the same folder as Vagrantfile, and it will be automatically loaded. In case of conflict, values in the 'extra' file will supersede values in this file.


 * Run GUI applications on the virtual machine?
 * If you have an X server installed, SSH into the virtual machine using  to enable X forwarding. (Mac users should update to the latest version of XQuartz.)


 * As an alternative, you can run the virtual machine in GUI mode, which allows you to interact with the VM as though it had a physical display. To enable GUI mode, create a file called  in the root repository folder, with this as its content:


 * Save the file and run  followed by  . The virtual machine's display will appear in a window on your desktop.


 * Adjust the resources allocated to the VM?
 * If you'd like to allocate more or less CPU / RAM to the VM, create a, patterned after this example:

Advanced usage
As an alternative to managing all MediaWiki settings in a single, large LocalSettings.php file, consider grouping your configurations by component or theme, and creating a separate PHP file in  for each group. This makes it quite easy to keep your settings organized, to temporarily disable specific configurations, and to share settings with others. MediaWiki will automatically load any PHP files in  in lexical order. You can control the order in which your configurations are set by adopting the habit of adding a two-digit prefix to each file name.

For example:

 settings.d/   ├── 10-RunFirst.php ├── 20-SomeExtension.php └── 99-RunLast.php

Note that the settings files in  are automatically created and destroyed in response to your Puppet configuration. Don't put your custom settings there, because Puppet will erase or override them. Keep your custom settings files in  instead.

Authoring roles
MediaWiki-Vagrant uses Puppet to configure MediaWiki on the virtual machine. Puppet is a configuration management tool that works by providing a domain-specific language for expressing software configurations in a declarative fashion. Files containing Puppet code are called 'manifests'. When Puppet runs, it interprets the manifests you feed it and configures the machine accordingly. MediaWiki-Vagrant's Puppet code is located in the. These roles depend on Puppet modules in. The Puppet code is generally well-documented and contains examples that demonstrate its proper usage.

Setting up labs instances
You can use Labsvagrant to configure Wikimedia Labs machines with a given MediaWiki-Vagrant role.

Bugs
If you spot a bug in MediaWiki-Vagrant, please report it. First, make sure the bug is not a known Vagrant or VirtualBox bug by searching the Vagrant issue tracker on GitHub and the VirtualBox Bugtracker. If it is not, go ahead and submit the bug to Wikimedia Bugzilla. Clearly describe the issue and include steps to reproduce, whenever possible.

Links

 * Project page on Ohloh
 * MediaWiki-Vagrant on GitHub
 * Labsvagrant configure Wikimedia Labs instances based on MediaWiki-Vagrant roles