As an experiment (and be bold etc), I've enabled this for the mobile domain on the enwiki beta cluster [1]. If you hit any problems with these please let me know on the ticket [2] and I or somebody else can revert the associated config change.

What this means, is live content from production wikis will now appear on mobile beta cluster pages which do not have a beta cluster version. For example, https://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Spain shows content from the beta cluster, but https://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Singapore shows content from English Wikipedia. In the case of the latter a 404 response code is sent, to ensure these pages do not get indexed by search engines. This means that it shouldn't interfere with any browser tests (Minerva beta cluster tests are still passing [3])

This is beneficial for testing out real world content within the context of a skin e.g. timeless, vector or minerva. We have many frontend bugs that were difficult to test before this technique. My team has been using this on labs [4] for many months now and it's been pretty indefensible to us, so my thinking is it will be useful to others working with skins.

If it's useful, in future this technique can be used for desktop and other projects on the beta cluster e.g. wikivoyage BC [5] - just let me know!

In the unlikely event this breaks any kind of testing you are trying to do, please point your frustrations at me via the ticket [2] and I'll roll this experiment back immediately and you would have given me valuable insights into ways to improve this tool!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org [2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207508 [3] https://integration.wikimedia.org/ci/view/Reading-Web/job/selenium-MinervaNe... [4] https://reading-web-staging.wmflabs.org [5] https://en.wikivoyage.beta.wmflabs.org/

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 10:57 AM Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:

I've been meaning to document this for a while. If you're finding yourself visiting Special:Export/Import often for the purpose of MediaWiki development there is a much better way to get content into your local wiki for testing purposes.

This short video explains how MobileFrontend extension provides tooling to help you debug live on-wiki content via $wgMFContentProviderClass [1] https://youtu.be/uRQzjN0hBlY

Hope it saves someone lots of time!

[1] https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-MobileFrontend/blob/master... -- Jon Robson Senior Software Engineer