For PHP deps we've got composer dependency installation for extensions, so
it seems like there's an opportunity to do other build steps in this stage...
Definitely. If we can hook into the existing composer build step that seems like it would make the most sense e.g. post-update post-install
What's the best wiki page to get an overview of how deployment to the beta cluster/production works? I'd like to tinker with these and see if I can get one of those steps running npm jobs.
On Thu, 15 Jun 2017 at 03:01 Joaquin Oltra Hernandez < jhernandez@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks for the comprehensive responses.
*I can certainly stillsee the possible benefit of having a full fledged build step for core,skins, and extensions. It is something that should be thought about abit before diving right into an implementation though. One thing toconsider is if what would be best is a packaging step that leads to atarball or similar artifact that can be dropped into a runtimeenvironment for MediaWiki or if instead it would be better to have aunified post-deploy build step that operates across MediaWiki core andthe entire collection of optional extensions and skins deployed tocreate a particular wiki.*
Totally agree, it is something that needs careful consideration. Even if the choice is to have a per-extension packaging step that produces a deployable, it would be great to have shared conventions across repos to run it (something like a *scripts/build{.sh,.bat}* that internally performs the specific build steps of the project.
If that exists, then we can build into core the build step that coordinates those sub-build steps where needed.
*One of the awesome features of working on a PHP codebase is the quickcycle of making a change and seeing it live in your test environment.Today that is mostly a matter of saving an edit and hitting refresh ina browser. It would be sad to lose that, so the build system that isdevised should also provide a path that allows a git clone to be aviable wiki.*
That is indeed nice, but it is already the case of many extensions and repos that have build steps for frontend code (see grunt and makefiles in extensions), it is just that we run them adhoc in developer's machines and use git's master as the deploy tarball.
This means that the deploy tarball has built assets that depend on who built and committed something, and whatever tools they had on their local system (node, npm, grunt and node_modules libraries), instead of in a reproducible place like our CI machines.
For whatever reason, the reality is the front-end world has moved to node based tooling and build steps, so all the great tools that are well maintained are run in a build step (unless you run node.js on your server and plug it in there). That's why many projects use grunt and tools from npm for linting, optimizing images, and other tasks.
I think that coming up with a standard build process would allow us to do away with the adhoc way of building things into the repository on master, and allow us to painlessly introduce some very interesting improvements to front-end tooling.
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 6:07 PM David Barratt dbarratt@wikimedia.org wrote:
Symfony is going to start recommending the use of `make` starting with version 4, so it might be something worth exploring: http://fabien.potencier.org/symfony4-best-practices.html#makefile
(I have no opinion on the matter)
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 5:48 PM, Bryan Davis bd808@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 2:29 PM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 10:18 AM, Joaquin Oltra Hernandez < jhernandez@wikimedia.org> wrote:
*Context*
We'd like to have a build script/process for an extension so that I
can
perform certain commands to install dependencies and perform
optimizations
on the extension sources. For example, on front-end sources.
Some examples could be:
- Installing libraries from bower or npm and bundling them into
the
resources folder
- Applying post processing steps to CSS with something like post
css
- Optimizing images
We are aware of other projects that have build processes for
building
deployables, but not extensions. Such projects have different ways of dealing with this. A common way
is
having a repository called <Project>/deploy and in there you pull
from
<Project> and run the build scripts, and that is the repository that
gets
deployed.
*Current system*
The current way we usually do this (if we do) is run those build scripts/jobs on the developers machines and commit them into the git repository on master.
With this system, if you don't enforce anything in CI, then build
processes
may be skipped (human error).
If you enforce it (by running the process and comparing with what
has
been
committed in CI) then patches merged to master that touch the same
files
will produce merge conflicts with existing open patches, forcing a rebase+rebuild on open patches every time one is merged on master.
*Questions*
Can we have a shared configuration/convention/system for having a
build
step on mediawiki extensions?
- So that a build process is run
- on CI jobs that require production assets like the selenium
jobs
- on the deployment job that deploys the extension to the beta cluster and to productionHow would it look like? Are any extensions doing a pre-deployment
build
step?
For JS dependencies, image optimizations etc the state of the art
still
seems to be to have a local one-off script and commit the build
artifacts
into the repo. (For instance TimedMediaHandler fetches some JS libs
via
npm
and copies/patches them into the resources/ dir.)
For PHP deps we've got composer dependency installation for
extensions,
so
it seems like there's an opportunity to do other build steps in this stage...
Not sure offhand if that can be snuck into composer directly or if
we'd
need to replace the "run composer" step with "run this script, which
runs
composer and also does other build steps".
When I first joined the Foundation and started working with MediaWiki on a daily basis I wondered about the lack of a build process. At past jobs I had built PHP application environments that had a "run from version control" mode for local development, but always included a build step for packaging and deployment that did the sort of things that Joaquin is talking about. When I was in the Java world Ant and then later Maven2 were the tools of choice for this work. Later in a PHP shop I selected Phing as the build tool and even committed some enhancements upstream to make it work nicer with the type of projects I was managing.
I helped get Composer use into MediaWiki core and that added a post deploy build step for MediaWiki, but one that is pretty limited in what it can do easily. Composer is mostly a tool for installing PHP library dependencies. Most of the attempts I have seen to make it do things beyond that are clunky uses of the tool. I can certainly still see the possible benefit of having a full fledged build step for core, skins, and extensions. It is something that should be thought about a bit before diving right into an implementation though. One thing to consider is if what would be best is a packaging step that leads to a tarball or similar artifact that can be dropped into a runtime environment for MediaWiki or if instead it would be better to have a unified post-deploy build step that operates across MediaWiki core and the entire collection of optional extensions and skins deployed to create a particular wiki.
The Foundation's production deployment use case will always be an anomaly. It should be considered, but really in my opinion only to ensure that nothing absolutely requires external network access in the final build. For Composer this turned out to be as easy as maintaining a submodule with all the vendored libraries included.
The two main use cases to consider for build tooling are (in this order) 3rd party deployers of MediaWiki and local developers. 3rd party users are the most important because this is the largest number of people who will be impacted by tooling changes. In an ideal world all or most of the changes could be hidden by changes to ExtensionDistributor or similar tooling that makes it easy to create a download and run tarball.
One of the awesome features of working on a PHP codebase is the quick cycle of making a change and seeing it live in your test environment. Today that is mostly a matter of saving an edit and hitting refresh in a browser. It would be sad to lose that, so the build system that is devised should also provide a path that allows a git clone to be a viable wiki. This runtime doesn't need to be the best that the wiki could be however. Its usually ok if a local dev environment needs to do a bit more work than a prod deployment would to gather l10n resources and do other dynamic processes that would be expected to be baked into artifacts for a production deployment.
$0.02 USD, Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation bd808@wikimedia.org [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Manager, Cloud Services Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855
<(415)%20839-6885>
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