MediaWiki Quickstart by Monte Hurd

Estimated reading time is 2 minutes.

It’s rare that I write about a piece of software written by a coworker. MediaWiki Quickstart is so useful that it deserves a post.

Monte started the project in 2021 and wrote the vast majority of the code. According to contributor analytics he created more than 800 commits. (I’m in the second place with just above 50 commits. The third is Peter Hedenskog with more than 10 commits.)

According to repository analytics, it’s mostly shell, followed by PHP, Vue, JavaScript and HCL. (I’ve never heard about HCL, I think. I’ll have dig deeper.)

What does it do? It’s the simplest way to get MediaWiki working on your machine. The only dependency is Docker.

From zero to Mediawiki in three steps:

• Install Docker
• Clone mediawiki-quickstart
• ./fresh_install

Want to install an extension, or a skin?

./install extensions/Echo

./install skins/Modern

Something went wrong? Just do a fresh install.

./fresh_install

I’ll finish by mentioning two of my favorite features.

The fist one is a job that runs continuously. It’s testing if Selenium tests work for all supported extensions and skins.

The second one is live view of the desktop of the Docker container where Selenium tests are running.

./run_selenium_tests