Installing Wikibase with Docker

The Wikibase team is now regularly releasing Docker images with MediaWiki, Wikibase and associated services. With a little customization, you can install exactly the kind of Wikibase instance you need.

Before you start

You’ll need to have docker and docker-compose installed on the computer where you want to run your Wikibase instance. (For help with this step, consult the resources list at the bottom of the page.)
The Wikibase team recommends providing at least 8GiB of RAM for a complete Docker install including all services.
- You can get quick insight into your Docker resource usage with the docker stats command; also check out Docker’s documentation on resource constraints.

Preparing your environment

Clone the wikibase-release-pipeline repository.

In the example directory, copy the template.env file to a file named .env and populate the following sections with the secure usernames and passwords of your choice.

Mediawiki Configuration

MW_ADMIN_NAME
MW_ADMIN_PASS
MW_ADMIN_EMAIL

These values will be deployed into your MediaWiki installation. You'll use this username and password to log into the web interface of your new instance for the first time; the email address you enter here also serves as your password recovery channel.

MW_SECRET_KEY

This secret key should be unique; MediaWiki uses it for several purposes (e.g., session management, fallback cryptographic entropy source). See the link for more information.

Database Configuration

DB_NAME
DB_USER
DB_PASS

The database name, user and password you specify here will be deployed into your installation.

Wikibase Configuration

WIKIBASE_PINGBACK=false

By default, the Wikibase pingback feature is disabled. Please consider enabling this feature (which sends only anonymized data) by changing false to true.

Enabling this feature significantly improves Wikimedia Deutschland's insight into how Wikibase is being used and helps us make more informed decisions regarding the development roadmap. For more information, read our pingback documentation topic.

WIKIBASE_HOST=localhost
WIKIBASE_PORT=80

If you need MediaWiki to run on a different port or IP on your system, you can change those here.

Files

Place your modified .env file in the example folder, or place it and the complete contents of the example folder in a folder of your choice.

Bear in mind that the name of this folder is used in the Docker container names.

Minimal install

At this stage, you have what you need to install MediaWiki (running on port 80) with Wikibase and a MySQL (MariaDB) backing database.

Simply run:

docker-compose up -d

Extended install

You may also wish to run additional services like the query service (WDQS), QuickStatements (see here for more information) and Elasticsearch.

To do so, you'll need to make some changes to the files provided in the example directory.

1. In docker-compose.yml, uncomment two areas:

a. Uncomment the line that calls the extended install script. b. Uncomment the lines that specify MW_ELASTIC_HOST and MW_ELASTIC_PORT.

The code snippet below shows the lines uncommented, with surrounding lines for context.

Since YAML is very picky about indentation, remove only the # character, leaving the rest indented as it is.

docker-compose.yml:

...
    volumes:
      - quickstatements-data:/quickstatements/data
      - ./extra-install.sh:/extra-install.sh
    networks:
...
      - DB_NAME=${DB_NAME}
      - MW_ELASTIC_HOST=elasticsearch.svc
      - MW_ELASTIC_PORT=9200
      - WIKIBASE_HOST
...

2. Run:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.extra.yml up -d

Notes

Both install processes end up launching two Docker containers:

{folder-name}_wikibase_1
{folder-name}_mysql_1.

The example invocations of docker-compose use the -d flag to start the containers in the background. You can omit this flag to run in the foreground, or, if you simply wish to view the continuous output, you can subsequently run docker-compose logs -f.

After install

1. Verify that all the services have started: run docker-compose ps. You should see something like this:

       Name                    Command             State         Ports       
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
example_mysql_1      docker-entrypoint.sh mysqld   Up      3306/tcp          
example_wikibase_1   /bin/bash /entrypoint.sh      Up      0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp

2. Log in at [1].

3. You may check the logs for success, further information or errors using this command: sudo docker-compose logs --tail=20 -t

For more detailed information, check out the README in the examples section of the wikibase-release-pipeline repository.

Using your new instance

Once all the services have started, you can begin the exciting process of filling up, extending and customizing your empty instance of Wikibase. Take a look at our setup resources page to get started.

User:Dan Shick (WMDE)/Drafts/Docker

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