User:Dan Nessett/Technical/How to set up a CZ clone on Ubuntu

Notes

• Had to modify createAndPromote.php to check password for validity before creating user. Otherwise, if the password is invalid a "ghost" user is created in mwuser table.
• Had to create a dummy user with user_id of 0, so XML dump import would work.
• Need to set Xdebug variables for both apache2/php and php-cli versions of php.ini
• Had to set xdebug.max_nesting_level=200 in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini so dump import wouldn't croak.
• Some useful information on MW XML dumps: http://www.mail-archive.com/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg01712.html, http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/180598, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Xml2sql
• Used cloc to count lines of PHP code in CZ:

Directory	Files	Blank Lines	Comments	PHP code statements
CZ phase 3	1005	56590	69544	460125
CZ includes	321	14769	33313	97375
CZ extensions	142	3769	6742	27350
CZ includes+extensions	463	18583	40055	124725

• Using importDump.php in /maintenance I populated a version of CZ as a local development environment. The Statistics special page showed in excess of 129,000 pages. The import reported populating 116,400 pages (looking at the pages table, the exact number is 116,486). This checks out, since the daily dump of CZ does not include histories. There are approximately 12,700 live articles, each of which would have a history page. Noting, 116,500 + 12,700 = 129,200, it appears all content pages were loaded. However, it took in excess of 3 1/2 days (about 80 hours) to import the content. This suggests looking at more efficient import strategies (e.g., using mwdumper or converting to SQL with xml2sql and importing directly into the database).
• Had trouble getting skins to work. I needed to set $wgScriptPath to /mediawiki/CZ_1_13_2/phase3. Originally had it set to $IP. But, that expands to /usr/local/src/mediawiki/CZ_1_13_2/phase3, which is not accessible through the apache2 server. The correct value uses the /mediawiki apache2 alias.

I now need to run maintenance/runJobs.php. The statistics page shows 272,975 queued jobs, so running all queued jobs is going to take a while. Dan Nessett 22:39, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

• Had trouble getting texvc to work:

• The message "failed to parse cannot write to or create math temp directory" signals problems with permissions on the images directory in phase3.
• Need to ensure images directory has both a /math and /tmp subdirectory with read/write access and the images directory is accessible to the apache2 server (I simply chmod 777 both of them).
• Originally had $wgUploadPath to "$IP/images". This is incorrect. This variable must be set to a URL prefix that is accessible to the apache2 server. Set it to "$wgScriptPath/images" and TeX math worked.
• Ran into a strange problem where no matter how I changed the permissions on images/math and images/tmp, the message "failed to parse cannot write to or create math temp directory" appeared. Somehow this message stopped showing up. I don't know exactly why, but perhaps you need to clear the browser cache.
• I tried putting the directories/files in images into the www-data subgroup and owned by www-data and then changing permissions on everything below images to 775. However, subversion needs to get to locks in this directory tree (even when images has the svn:ignore property). So, while math rendering worked, when I committed changes to the repository, subversion failed on attempting to create a lock in images/.svn. So, I finally gave up and executed sudo chmod -R 777 images. This seems to fix all math rendering and subversion problems, but it is very insecure.

• Had trouble getting email to work. Since the installation is intended for local development, I chose to set up only local email. Therefore, every user must have an email address of <username>@localhost. When Ubuntu is installed, the exim4 MTA/MDA is installed by default. It is only necessary to set up an email client to receive emails. I used GNOME evoution (which is also installed by default). In order to set up evolution to receive local email, I had to set up the configuration as follows:

• Account name: Local Email Account
• Full Name: Dan Nessett
• Email Address dnessett@localhost
• Server Type: Local delivery
• Configuration (path): /var/mail/dnessett
• Server Type: Sendmail

• When we have a CZ repository set up, need to exclude some directories in phase3 from version control. In order to exclude all images in phase3/images from version control (other than those preloaded in icons), set property svn:ignore * on that directory.