Manual:Pywikibot/Third-party Wiki Quick Start

This page is a short working summary of Manual:Pywikibot/Use on third-party wikis . See that page for more detail if anything is not clear and if your wiki has more namespaces, languages or it uses other setups not discussed here. Most of this should work for a single wiki site in English language. If you have a wiki in a non-English language, you can change the family file accordingly (it's easy).

Before you try to create a bot, take a look at the scripts available. The scripts are flexible and can do a lot of tasks but if one is not available for your specific task, you might have to make one yourself in Python.

Requirements for a bot

To run a bot on your wiki and not on your personal computer, you will need shell access to your hosting provider . If you don't know whether you have shell access, ask your hosting provider.

To check whether you have Python installed and its version, type "python3 --version" at the shell prompt.

Python 3.7 or higher is currently required to run the bot, but Python 3.8 or higher is recommended.

The scripts should be run with pwb.py, which can be found in the root directory of pywikibot.

$ python3 pwb.py myscript

Steps

What you'll be doing: You will be creating a bot username on your wiki, give rights to it, get the bot software, make two text files, upload the software, log the bot in and run a test script to see if the bot works.

1. Make a username for your bot, like someone would make a regular user account on the wiki (e.g. SiteBot/password). Make sure you have a reasonably secure password (not something easy like "sitebot123").

2. Logout from the bot account and login to your account which have the Bureaucrat right. In the User rights, give that username "bot" rights. If you have the Flagged revisions extension, give that bot "reviewer" and "editor" rights.

3. Download The Pywikibot software on your computer. Direct link to zip file or see Downloads section for other formats.

4. Extract the contents of the zip file to a folder on your computer. There will be many subfolders in that directory. All of this is the bot software. Beware of non-English (accented) letters in the path, because with Linux they have caused problems in several cases.

5. Inside the folder that you placed Pywikibot, create a text file with the name "user-config.py" that has the following customized lines:

mylang = 'en'
family = 'yoursite'
usernames['yoursite']['en'] = 'MySiteBot'
console_encoding = 'utf-8'

Where you see "yoursite" for the family variable, use a simple name to identify your site, that is, in all lower case letters. You should use the same value as the value of $wgSitename.

For:

usernames['yoursite']['en'] = 'SiteBot'

SiteBot is the name of your bot user account that you made in step 1. Use correct case.

Save this file.

6. To use your bot on the wiki server, upload the "pywikibot" directory to your server. This directory should not be in the same directory as LocalSettings.php file, or else by default users will be able to access the files using a URL which points to that directory.

7. Login to your shell account and navigate to that uploaded directory on your server.

8. Now you'll create a family file for your site. First see if it can be generated automatically. On the Shell prompt, type "python3 pwb.py generate_family_file" and press enter. If you get an error and the file is not generated, then follow the example below.

For the simplest case where there's only one wiki in the English language, here's an example from the Mozilla Wiki:

from pywikibot import family

# The official Mozilla Wiki. #Put a short project description here.

class Family(family.Family):
    name = 'mozilla' # Set the family name; this should be the same as in the filename.
    langs = {
        'en': 'wiki.mozilla.org', # Put the hostname here.
    }

    # Translation used on all wikis for the different namespaces.
    # Most namespaces are inherited from family.Family.
    # Check the family.py file (in main directory) to see the standard
    # namespace translations for each known language.
    # You only need to enter translations that differ from the default.
    namespaces[4] = {
        '_default': 'MozillaWiki', # Specify the project namespace here.
    }

    namespaces[5] = {
        '_default': 'MozillaWiki talk', # Specify the talk page of the project namespace here.
    }

    def version(self, code):
        return "1.4.2"  # The MediaWiki version used.

    def scriptpath(self, code):
        return '' # The relative path of index.php, api.php : look at your wiki address.
        # This line may need to be changed to /wiki or /w,
        # depending on the folder where your mediawiki program is located.
        # Note: Do not _include_ index.php, etc.

This text file should be renamed "mywiki_family.py" (replace mywiki with your wiki's name, all lowercase) and be uploaded to the "families" folder (you'll find other family files there, they can be ignored). You now have a family file for your site.

9. Now login to your bot and see if it works. On the shell prompt, in the "pywikibot" directory, type in: "python3 pwb.py login". It should prompt for the bot's password which you made in step 1. If it logs in, you'll see a 'success' message. You only have to do this once. Bots usually stay logged in.

10. To test if your bot works or not, you can use an existing script that adds text to the top of all pages in a certain category. On your site, find a category that has only a few pages in it, not more than 10, so you can revert them easily. If you don't have such a category, add a temporary category to any 3 pages on the site.

At your shell command prompt, inside the pywikibot directory, run the add_text script:

$ python3 pwb.py add_text -cat:catname -text:"This is a Test." -except:"\{\{([Tt]emplate:|)[Dd]ocumentation [Ss]ubpage" -up

Replace catname in "-cat:catname". The catname is the name of your 'test' category. For example if the title of the category page is "Category:Test Pages", you will write "-cat:test_pages" in that command.

This will insert the text "This is a Test." on top of all pages in that test category.

If the bot is working, you'll see the shell command prompt change accordingly.

11. Go to your Recent Changes and click on "show bots" to see if your bot has made the edits.

For other bots, see: Manual:Pywikibot/Scripts and Manual:Pywikibot/Create your own script. If you can't find a bot that will do the stuff you want it to do, you can see the existing scripts for suggestions on how you could make your own bot.

When you run a new untested bot script, run it on a "test" wiki in case it goes out of control. You can also block it like you would block a regular wiki username. You can also quit the shell prompt.

Notes

If you need more help on setting up your Pywikibot visit the #pywikibot IRC channel ^connect or pywikibot@ mailing list.