Wikimedia Labs/Toolforge

The design for Tool Labs is still in the very early phases; it may change drastically as the project ramp up begins in January 2013. The first target of Tool Labs is to be a replacement for Toolserver; see /Needed toolserver features.

There is now a partial, in progress TODO list at /TODO and a partial, in progress list of tools on the toolserver Toolserver/List_of_Tools.

Goals

 * Provide an environment for rapid prototyping
 * Close to production, but simplified
 * Easy deployment of MediaWiki
 * Provide a ramp for new developers
 * Tools and extensions can easily move to Test/Dev Labs
 * Provide a location for bot authors to maintain and run their bots (in progress at bots.wmflabs.org)
 * Provide a location for analytics work

A key goal of Tool Labs is to provide an easy development environment meant to be used as a ramp to the Test/Dev Labs environment. The goal is to facilitate the rapid development of software that we can then identify as something target-able for production support. Software can be moved from Tool Labs to Test/Dev Labs, formalized, and then deployed to production.

Getting started

 * 99.999% of the time, you should log into
 * From there, sudo into your tool:
 * You can access the database by simply doing, since your credentials are in .my.cnf
 * Submit your jobs with . There are some more options you can add, see SGE for some examples
 * The default queue is continuous, which means it will automatically restart your job if it didn't quit with status 0.
 * You can switch to the  queue with   which will run the script and end when it finishes, regardless of status code.