Wikimedia Developer Support

Who is allowed to request a Cloud VPS?

vagrant
debugging
cloud-vps
#1

I am developing a theme for OOUI and as per the recommendation of T100896#4879623 I set out to test the changes on a development version of mediawiki/core. Upon creating a MediaWiki-Vagrant instance on GCP(as seen here in my last post) I was unsuccessful and will most likely continue to be since it could be a vagrant issue perhaps.

The MediaWIki-Vagrant page has a page dedicated to Cloud VPS and considering there are a lot of mediawiki projects on there, there is no doubt that if I set one up there I would be able to continue with Phabricator task. However, I’m not a WikiMedia employee or a code contributor.

Am I allowed to request a Cloud VPS? Should I even bother?

#2

Then you’re good! Cloud VPS is an infrastructure maintained for people like you. :slight_smile:

About your more general question (Who is allowed to request a Cloud VPS?), https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Cloud_VPS says

projects related to the Wikimedia movement

which MediaWiki and OOUI are part of.

#3

The reason I am asking is because this only a result of maintaining my own wiki. I didn’t really set out expecting to have to develop a theme. I wouldn’t say I am helping the Wikimedia movement (not sure how a theme would help) since while I’m submitting code, it’s suited to code directly involved with helping my wiki. I feel kind of like a fraud for requesting resources. Just making sure :sweat_smile:.

#4

MediaWiki aims to be a software platform. A platform is in a better place when it has plenty of third parties with their own agendas. In fact, this is arguably what software platforms are all about!

Let me insist: you’re good. Just proceed with your request.

And by the way, I am just someone trying to reply quickly the correct answer in a forum. The own Cloud VPS process is designed to detect “fraud”. Submitting your request is the best way to get an official response. :slight_smile:

#5

Thank you I’ll give it a try then!!!

#6

I agree that it sounds like a totally appropriate use of resources. More OOUI themes means OOUI gets better! Even if those themes aren’t used on Wikimedia sites.

Do you need a whole VPS though? Because your other option is to set up a tool on Toolforge. That’s a shared hosting environment, and you can create tools without approval. And you don’t have to worry about maintaining the server.

#7

I looked into toolforge, however i’m not sure of any documentation that goes into setting up MediaWiki-Vagrant on toolforge. From most of what I read about toolforge it’s appears to be mainly for running bots (Pywikibot etc) rather than setup up instances for debugging MediaWiki and it’s extensions. If I’m wrong about that then I’d rather not waste resources for a development environment (the vagrant setup is to connect to my Jetbrain IDE to use XDebug).

Right now the System Requirements for Mediawiki-Vagrant also appear to be relatively large and I’m genuinely worried that the vagrant setup won’t work on toolforge since it already failed on an 8gig GCP machine.

Cloud VPS Request: T214156

#8

Good point, I’m not sure you can use Vagrant. But you definitely can install MediaWiki and run it, you just have to do it more manually. For your custom theme you can just run it with your patched version of core. (You won’t be able to do Node-based build things, perhaps, but those can be done locally I think?)

#9

Yeah, I can already do that on my local dev environment. However, on changes between versions I had to migrate, create and delete DBs a lot since I’m testing on version 1.31 upto master which can get quite tiring (my skin is right now version 1.31 and i need to make it compatible with master). Plus I won’t be able to use XDebug. And yes I don’t need a server for the node stuff, I do that locally! I sent in a request just in case to Toolforge as well just now so in the event that it doesn’t work atleast by tuesday I will have an answer o Cloud VPS.

#10

Cloud VPS will take longer to aprove, they’ll discuss it on a weekly Tuesday meeting, if the request ticket has the needed info, Toolforge has a quicker response.

There is node on Toolforge, though some assembly is required for version management.

MediaWiki on Toolforge is a bit slow though, not sure this will be a problem for you.

#11

FWIW MediaWikiVagrant needs around a gigabyte of memory, it must have failed for some other reason. But yeah you can’t run your own virtual machines on Toolforge.

#12

Yeah I just confirmed with #wikimedia-cloud as well about this. Vagrant needs root acess and running manually on mediawiki requires upto date dependecies which is also not available on toolforge without root. So there appears to be no way to atually run mediawiki on toolforge.

#13

What dependencies are required? Do you mean Node.js? Because the PHP side of things all works without problems on Toolforge (well… maybe ‘all’ is stretching it, but core and most common extensions are completely fine, in my experience).

#14

Thank you! I should have updated this. I was able to successfully setup MediaWiki with toolforge using the latest stretch server after talking to the folks on #wikimedia-cloud.

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Trusty_deprecation

#15

Oh cool! Glad to hear it. :slight_smile: