Upgrade Mediawiki to 1.35

[SuperQ]

Mediawiki 1.31 is LTS until September 2021. Time to upgrade.

In order to upgrade, we need to update PHP (currently Debian stretch, php 7.0), php 7.3.19 is required, 7.3.29 is in Debian buster.

• Option 1: Upgrade m3.noisebridge.net to Debian buster.
• Option 2: Containerize our mediawiki and deploy it under docker/podman.

[SuperQ]

I did some digging into how much work it would be to use a Docker image. Mediawiki has official docker images.

The current image is based on the official php 7.4 image, which is based on buster-slim. This seems like a reasonable base to build on.

The official recommendation to handle extensions and such is to build your own image with FROM mediawiki and then tack on whatever you need. This seems reasonable to me. We can build a publishing pipeline with CircleCI/docker hub or similar.

CC @lizzard

[sunjam]

I recommend always deploying via docker-compose.yml files. It is easy to translate any docker run string into a compose file. Example here.

Also, we could consider Podman, which is fully compatible with Docker, but runs daemon-less and does not need to be run as root.

[SuperQ]

Should be easy enough to manage with the Ansible docker compose module.

Agreed, we should probably use podman as well.

[sunjam]

Currently, we run both podman and docker / docker-compose side-by-side on Unicorn and that works as well. It is only because we didn't know about podman at first.

[mcint]

People interested in this discussion should know about https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Meza, however it's RHEL-based. Ansible notebooks for deploying a wiki(farm), with extensions, and even elasicsearch. NASA maintained. It has some framework for debian support, 4 years out of date, PRs would be needed, but likely accepted.

https://github.com/nasa/meza

• config/Debian.yml#L15 (package equivalents not found)
• config/RedHat.yml

[wwwerk]

Writing in to say I'm happy to help with this effort and hope an upgrade and a facelift to the Wiki will make for something more mobile/responsive.