mediawiki-containers

Containerized MediaWiki install including VisualEditor, Parsoid, RESTBase, Mathoid & other services.

Requirements

You need docker >= 1.6. On a recent Debian or Ubuntu distribution (Jessie, Sid), this can be installed with apt-get install docker.io. See the Docker install instructions for other platforms.

The minimum hardware requirements are a KVM or similar VM with 512M RAM. These can be had from a variety of vendors for around $5/month. This comparison from ServerBear lists some options.

Description

Running sudo ./mediawiki-containers start in a checkout of this repository will start four containers:

• An Apache/MediaWiki container with PHP 5.6 and MediaWiki 1.27-wmf9 using wikimedia/mediawiki, built from https://github.com/gwicke/docker-mediawiki.
• A MySQL container, used as the database backend for MediaWiki.
• A wikimedia/mediawiki-node-services container built from mediawiki-node-services, currently running RESTBase and Parsoid in a single node process for memory efficiency.
• A small DNS resolver for service discovery.

After startup, a brand new MediaWiki install will be reachable at http://localhost/.

Architecture notes

All data is stored outside the containers in a host directory:

ls /var/lib/mediawiki-containers/
mediawiki  mysql  node-services

This greatly simplifies backups and upgrades. Update scripts are run on each startup, which means that updating to a newer version of the entire setup is as easy as a restart:

sudo ./mediawiki-containers restart

Status & next steps

This is alpha quality software. The basic functionality of MediaWiki, services and VisualEditor is there, but some details about the configuration will likely change before this can be used in production.

Done:

• Hook up VisualEditor out of the box.
• Update to MediaWiki 1.26 1.27-wmf9.

Next steps:

• Forward /api/rest_v1/ to RESTBase & configure RESTBase updates. Enable Wikitext / HTML switching in VE.
• Set up systemd / init scripts to start up the docker-compose setup on boot.
  • Possibly, also provide a systemd-only startup script that doesn't require docker-compose.
• Add more extensions?
• Use HHVM?
• Profit.

Tell us about your ideas at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T92826.

Alternative to the shell script: docker-compose

This project also provides an equivalent docker-compose configuration, which can be used by executing docker-compose up. A nice thing about using docker-compose is a very slightly cleaner configuration, and merged output from all containers.

A downside is its lacking support for parametrizing the docker network IP. It turns out that docker on older distributions like Jessie uses a different network than newer distros, which makes it difficult to support DNS resolution in both using the same docker-compose config. The provided configuration assumes a recent distribution, so won't work on Jessie out of the box.