On Fri, Jun 9, 2017 at 12:56 AM, Alexandros Kosiaris < akosiaris@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I also don't think you need RESTBase as long as you are willing to wait for parsoid to finish parsing and returning the result.
Apart from performance, there is also functionality that is missing without RESTBase:
- Diffs are going to contain a lot of extra changes (commonly called "dirty diffs"), as no original HTML or data-parsoid is available to Parsoid's selective serialization algorithm. This might make it difficult to review changes. - Switching between wikitext and visual editing won't work. - Visual editing in general will very likely stop working once we reduce the size of HTML by separating out metadata (see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T78676). We keep pushing this back due to a lack of resources, but it is still planned, and might happen within the next six months.
In short, using Parsoid directly for visual editing is an unsupported configuration, and is likely to stop working altogether in the foreseeable future.
On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 7:10 AM, James Montalvo jamesmontalvo3@gmail.com wrote:
I've read through the documentation I think you're talking about. It's kind of hard to determine where to start since the docs are spread out between multiple VE, Parsoid and RESTBase pages. Installing RESTBase is, as you say, straightforward (git clone, npm install, basically). Configuring is not clear to me, and without clear docs it's the kind of thing that takes hours of trial and error.
The RESTBase install instructions https://github.com/wikimedia/restbase#installation point to a fairly well-commented example documentation file: https://github.com/wikimedia/restbase/blob/master/config.example.yaml
For a basic install, all you should need is adjust the lines marked with XXX in there. The default backend will use SQLite. Cassandra offers better scalability and distribution for large scale, but this is not likely something you need. A single SQLite-backed RESTBase instance and a single Parsoid instance should be all you need.
We are aware of the complexity of setting up a fully featured MediaWiki system, and are working on a Kubernetes-based solution right now (see https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-containers/blob/k8s/README.k8s.md for current work in progress). The early prototype already sets up MediaWiki, VisualEditor, RESTBase, Parsoid, Math, as well as other services like EventBus. The current work is primarily aimed at development and testing, but we expect it to also offer a quick way to spin up a complete & fully-featured containerized MediaWiki system for small installs.
Hope this helps,
Gabriel