Topic on Talk:XTools

Marking as resolved for now. Please re-open if further support is needed.

Hello!

I've been told that you folks stopped supporting non-WMF wikis from a reasonably reliable source.

Kind of explains why I've been having a mammoth issue getting it up and running on my non-WMF wiki, to be honest.

I was wondering if anyone could direct me to the last version of xtools that supported private wikis or a build that runs on 1.34.2 instead of whatever jiggery-pokery you folks are running these days. I can muddle through commenting out lines that break stuff on my own, but there's not a lot I can do when the script is looking for database fields that simply don't exist for me yet.

And while I'm being a pain I'd like to make a humble suggestion, would it be possible to update the documentation for installation on readthedocs to maybe give a heads up to folks that spinoffs aren't supported (and that mariadb is required)?

Hey! In the beginning, we aimed to support 3rd party installations, but no one ever expressed interest in XTools, even when we asked wikis about it directly. Eventually the maintenance burden was just too much given no one else cared, so we dropped support, which also opened the door to add WMF-specific features.

I apologize about the poor documentation. XTools is almost entirely maintained by myself these days during my free time, and I struggle to find the time to fix bugs, keep the service up and running reliably, and document every step I take. I will at least put up a disclaimer that non-WMF installations are not explicitly supported.

At any rate, it should be possible to use an older version of XTools. I believe I believe non-WMF support was dropped in version 3.10.0, so I would start with version 3.9.1 https://github.com/x-tools/xtools/releases/tag/3.9.1. You don't need MariaDB necessarily, but you do need MySQL-like. If you are using Postgres or something where MySQL won't translate, I'm afraid XTools will not work for you :( I think you said on IRC it was complaining about a missing meta database; that is only if you are using XTools on a wiki farm. If it's just a single wiki, set app.single_wiki to true. It shouldn't look for a meta database at all if that is set. More at https://xtools.readthedocs.io/en/3.9.1/installation.html#single-wiki

All of that said, I am more than happy to restore non-WMF support if I can get some help. If you're interested, let me know! However it might be complicated to support older versions of MediaWiki. I suppose we could create a branch tied to a specific MW version, and add bug fixes to it as needed.

Hope this helps.