A number of tools hosted on Toolforge rely on the replicated MediaWiki databases, dubbed "Wiki Replicas". Every so often these servers have replication lag, which affects the data returned as well as the performance of the queries. And when this happens, users get confused and start reporting bugs that aren't…
This past weekend at Wikipedia Day I had a discussion with Enterprisey and some other folks about different ways edit counters (more on that in a different blog post) could visualize edits, and one of the things that came up was GitHub's scorecard and streaks. Then I saw a post…
Toolforge is a free cloud computing platform designed for and used by the Wikimedia movement to host various tools and bots. One of the coolest parts of using Toolforge is that you get access to redacted copies of the MediaWiki MySQL database replicas, aka the wiki replicas. (Note that whenever…
Over the past two weeks I significantly sped up two of my Toolforge tools by using Redis, a key-value database. The two tools, checker and shorturls were slow for different reasons, but now respond instantaneously. Note that I didn't do any proper benchmarking, it's just noticably faster. If you're not…
CoverMe, hosted on Wikimedia Toolforge Test coverage is a useful metric, but it can be difficult to figure out exactly where to start. That's where CoverMe is useful - it sorts functions by how often they're called on Wikimedia production servers, and then displays their coverage status. Try it out!…
My Toolforge (formerly "Tool Labs") tools will now start requiring HTTPS, and redirecting any HTTP traffic. It's a little bit of common code for each tool, so I put it in a shared "toolforge" library. from flask import Flask import toolforge app = Flask(__name__) app.before_request(toolforge.redirect_to_https) And that's it! Your tool…
