Docker

Docker is virtualization software that allows administrators and developers to use "containers" to share environments containing software. These containers are isolated from other software running on the same computer. Docker is one way to deploy and run MediaWiki .

Official environment for simple development

MediaWiki-Docker is an official development docker environment for MediaWiki that is included in MediaWiki itself, starting with MediaWiki 1.35.

This environment has been built for simple experimentation, development, and testing of proposed changes to MediaWiki core. It is designed to be particularly simple and easy to use, and intended particularly to be a good option for newbies, be they testers, designers, developers, or others who have not yet invested a great deal of their time in setting up local environments.

To get started please read the instructions in the MediaWiki repo in DEVELOPERS.md.

There are a number of examples on the tool's page which you can explore to see how to set up various settings and extensions.

If you run into any issues, please file a task at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/mediawiki-docker/. The Dockerfiles and other configuration files used to generate the dev images may be found at releng/dev-images on the Wikimedia GitLab server.

Official image for complex development

We know that there are number of people who need a more complex, configurable, and powerful development and testing environment, even up to being a "Wikimedia production-like" state. The simple environment is not suitable for that use case; we plan to provide a more configurable and thus more complex, "heavy-weight" alternative for that use case in the future. You may wish to follow our work in Phabricator. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/local-charts/

In the mean time, please see below.

Official images for production

As of May 2025, there are no official Docker images recommended for hosting a third party MediaWiki production instance.

Wikimedia production is hosted using bespoke Docker images, but these are private (as they contain private settings and security controls) and so are not available (nor particularly useful) for third parties. See MediaWiki on Kubernetes for more information.

Unofficial images for production

T318977 requests official images for third parties be produced and distributed, but until it is, all production docker deployments are currently unofficial and done at your own risk.

• There is regularly-updated Docker Hub MediaWiki repository with images intended for production. More information at Docker/Docker Hub .

• The Canasta distribution is also structured as a Docker image.

See also

• Docker (software) article on Wikipedia