Wikipedia:Wikimedia Labs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikipedia:Wikimedia Labs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Migration from Toolserver to Wikimedia Labs[edit]

Main article: mw:Tool Labs/Roadmap en

In February 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation contracted Marc-André Pelletier to provide assistance to tool/bot authors in migrating their tools and bots to the Wikimedia Labs' servers. A help page for migrating has been setup at wikitech:User:Magnus Manske/Migrating from toolserver with helpful advice. General information may be found at mw:Wikimedia Labs/Migration of Toolserver tools.

Some users migrated their tools to WMFLabs early, the full-scale migration process began in June 2013 and is expected to be complete by December 2013 with everything completed by June 2014 when items on the toolserver will be deleted. Final decommissioning of the toolserver is tentatively scheduled to be complete by December 2014.



Wikimedia Labs (a.k.a. WMFLabs, WikiLabs, Labs) is the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)'s cloud computing environment for developing software for the Foundation's operations. It also hosts bots and tools maintained and used by the community to maintain the foundation's projects. The Wikimedia Labs project is managed from the Wikitech wiki which also hosts technical docs about the foundation's main servers (aka the production environment).



Wikimedia Labs was designed to give volunteer software developers a place to write and test software for WMF operations with the goal being to increase the volunteers helping maintain the WMF's infrastructure. It was opened for beta testing to a limited number of users in October 2011. After several months of testing, the service was opened to the general public in April 2012.



The project uses OpenStack to provide developers with instances to help them debug and test software updates and changes. Each instance is a virtual environment that can be shared with others. This allows developers to test configurations before they are deployed to the production environment.



Anybody is allowed to create an account on Wikimedia Labs, but all software must be released under a free license per mw:Wikimedia Labs/Terms of use. Related help can be found at wikitech:Help:Contents.



In addition to running software for operations and the infrastructure, Wikimedia Labs also hosts software that helps maintain WMF projects.



TUSC stands for Toolserver User Screening Control.



By the house rules, tools on the toolserver must not ask for passwords for users on Wikimedia projects.



However, sometimes it is necessary for a tool to verify the identity of a user to perform some operation on such a project.



At http://tools.wmflabs.org/tusc/index.html you can create a new account, with a new password, and then verify it against a Wikimedia project by performing a specific edit. You can then identify yourself in Toolserver or Tool Labs tools by giving this new account.



The original TUSC URL (currently redirecting to the Tool Labs version) was http://toolserver.org/~magnus/tusc.php?language=en&project=wikipedia .