User:BDavis (WMF)/Notes/Vagrant

I use MediaWiki-Vagrant exclusively to manage my local development environment. I'm also involved with efforts to use it to manage Labs instances. These are some notes on things I've found to be confusing or difficult in it's use and development. There may be some answers here that help others out. There may also just be open questions that I'm writing down so I remember to talk with others about them later.

Using MediaWiki-Vagrant

Logging

Debug logging wasn't working for me from apache hits. It turned out that /vagrant/logs and files inside needed `chmod g+w`. This has to be done on the host machine side! The command will complete without error from within the vm, but the permissions will not change. This is probably some voodoo associated with the virtualbox fileserver.

• There is some discussion starting about relocating logs to be exclusively in the VM container rather than in a host OS exported directory. BDavis (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

Update Extensions

Extensions don't update their git checkouts when `vagrant provision` runs. I have git-up in my path, so this trick updates them for me:

 $ cd /vagrant/mediawiki/extensions &&
   for d in *; do
     [[ -d $d ]] && ( echo $d && cd $d && git up && cd .. )
   done

It would be nice to find a more general answer for this possibly in the form of a `vagrant update-extensions` command that intelligently updates extensions that are unmodified and on the master branch.

Developing for MediaWiki-Vagrant

What's worthy of a role?

• Are roles for "teams" or "extensions" or ???
• If roles are for teams, what defines a team?
• If roles are for extensions, will the cli selector scale?

I think Ori's original vision was for roles to be "team" specific (eg a WMF features team). We are wandering away from this pretty rapidly. Roles are becoming more closely analogous to pre-extension setup containers. This doesn't seem likely to scale at least in the cli.