User:Skizzerz/VE on 1.23

This page details my odyssey of getting Extension:VisualEditor up-and-running on the 1.23 tarball version (rc0 at the time of this writing). Will upload images locally once guide is complete. If you decide to follow this guide yourself, please let me know on my talk page or IRC if there are any parts that are not perfectly clear so I can better explain them.

Environment

 * 1) To ensure a clean slate, I installed a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 Server VM. I then set up the LAMP environment by installing the following packages: apache2, mysql-server, php5, php5-gd, php5-mysql, php5-intl, php5-apcu.
 * 2) Since VirtualBox had the network type set to NAT, I also needed to setup a port forwarding rule so that I could access the webserver from the host machine to better simulate an external user hitting the website.
 * 3) I then downloaded the MediaWiki 1.23 tarball (release candidate 0 as of the time of this writing), extracted, and installed it using default settings.

Setting up Parsoid
This is a two-part process: first you need the parsoid node.js service, and then you need the Parsoid extension itself for MediaWiki.

Installing the node.js service:
 * 1) Download source from Git. Parsoid/Setup lists commands to download it using the git command line utility, however in this guide I am going to attempt to download only packaged versions of everything. Thus, follow these steps to download code from Wikimedia's git repository:
 * 2) Visit the parsoid repository page on GitBlit: https://git.wikimedia.org/summary/?r=mediawiki/services/parsoid.git
 * 3) Click "master" in the list of branches at the bottom of the page
 * 4) Click on the commit message at the very top of the log that gets displayed
 * 5) On the revision information page, click on one of the links to download a packaged version of the repository (zip, gz, or bzip2; see screenshot ).
 * 6) Extract the downloaded archive somewhere (I recommend throwing it in a directory named parsoid, it doesn't have to be in your wiki root).
 * 7) From here on, you can follow the directions in Parsoid/Setup in the "Manual Setup" section (skip the "Get the code" section, do everything else).

Installing the extension:
 * 1) Download source from Git (I got the REL1_23 branch): https://git.wikimedia.org/summary/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FParsoid.git
 * 2) Extract the downloaded archive to extensions/Parsoid in your wiki's root directory (you may need to create the directory first)
 * 3) Assuming you already made the changes to LocalSettings.php per part 1, there is nothing else you need to do here

TODO: steps on making parsoid start automatically when the code was manually downloaded/installed

Setting up VisualEditor
Downloading the package source from git doesn't work, so the command line tool is currently needed in order to fully get VisualEditor installed.  Run the following commands (assuming you are currently in your wiki's root directory): Follow the instructions in the "Basic setup instructions" and "Setup a Parsoid service" sections in Extension:VisualEditor to install VisualEditor 

Optional: Setting up TemplateData
This allows VisualEditor to behave more intelligently with respect to adding templates, by allowing the user to define how a template should be used.
 * 1) Follow instructions on Extension:TemplateData
 * 2) Set $wgTemplateDataUseGUI = true; in your LocalSettings.php (the example has it set to false)