Toolserver - Meta

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Toolserver

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The Toolserver has been closed down on July 1, 2014. Please use Wikimedia Cloud Services, or more precisely Toolforge. On MediaWiki.org you can find a collection of issues after Toolserver shutdown.

The Wikimedia Toolserver was a collaborative platform providing Unix hosting for various software tools written and used by Wikimedia editors. The service was operated by Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. with assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation.

It consists of thirteen servers as outlined here. The contents of the live databases are replicated in three clusters: S1 (English Wikipedia), S2 (some major languages), S3 (all others), with varying degree of delay (often referred to as replag).

Also associated with the Toolserver are the Toolserver wiki, a JIRA issue tracking system, and a FishEye revision control browser. Anyone may have an account on the wiki, JIRA, and FishEye, and the accounts are unified between the three systems.

Projects

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Please see Toolserver/Projects for a list of available tools and other content.

Account policy

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Account allocation

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Accounts on the Wikimedia Toolserver are given to those who want to use it to develop and run tools for a period of six months for a Wikimedia Foundation project, such as Wikipedia. Accounts must be requested with a justification and approved by Toolserver staff. To apply, give your nickname and specify reasons. It's very important that only tools are run on the Toolserver. Programs must not be seen as part of the MediaWiki software or Wikimedia Foundation projects.

The associated Wiki, JIRA, and FishEye systems do not require approval. Users can most easily establish an account on the wiki, which can then be used to log in to both the JIRA and FishEye systems.

Requesting an account

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For those programmers who are interested in having an account on the Toolserver, you may apply today at the accounts request page. Please note that there may be a delay in your account being created, but it will eventually be worked on if it does not have any questions outstanding from the Toolserver admins. If you require an account urgently, please state this and also a reason in your application.

Once your account is created, please take time to read "Getting started," which details what you need to know about your new account.

Usage conventions

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You should put an index website directly in the public_html directory, which links to all your tools and gives a short description of them. Files in this directory are accessible at http://toolserver.org/~yourusername/.

Please also put an .about.me file in your home directory (/home/yourusername) and make it readable to appear on the userlist, as described there.

We would like you to put two links at the bottom of every project site: "About this server" which links to http://toolserver.org, preferably using this button. The other link is "About this tool", which links to a form that says who wrote the script, where to find the source, full description. Your source code should be documented as well.

All sources should be free. That doesn't mean that you have to publish your code if it isn't ready and looks terrible, but when you're ready and the tool works, you have to clean up the code and put it in your subversion-repository on hemlock.

Toolserver administrators have full access to the server to look for security issues and ensure that the server is not abused or misused.

Recommended account naming conventions

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You should keep the following advice in mind when picking a username:

Avoid names that contain characters other than lowercase a-z, 0-9, and _.
- Your name will be used as a Unix login and directory name, so it should avoid any characters that have special meaning in shells or directory names, including most punctuation: whitespace plus ~`!#$&*(){}[]|\:;'"?/
- Your name will also be used as an e-mail address, so you can't use @.
- Your name will also be part of your user database name, so it should also avoid characters that have special meaning in MySQL. This includes some of the above, and also: - =.
- Unprintable or non-ASCII characters are right out, since sysadmins have to be able to type your name.
- Uppercase letters are conventionally frowned upon in Unix logins, and might just be lowercased by the sysadmin who creates your account.
- I can't think of a reason why %^, should be disallowed offhand, but I'm sure there is one.
Keep the name to eight characters or less if possible. Names longer than eight characters will make the output of some commands (like ls -l) ugly, and may make some other commands (like ps) confusing.

The above advice ranges from mandatory (usernames with / in them are impossible or may as well be) to advisory (- in your database name isn't a huge deal). If you ask for a name that doesn't adhere to the above guidelines, you may be asked to pick a different one.

Contact

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To ask questions about the Toolserver and accounts, visit the IRC channel #wikimedia-toolserver
To contact an individual Toolserver user, see the account list for contact details or send an e-mail to usernametoolserver.org
The Toolserver mailing list (to which all users must subscribe) is at http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l
The official contact for the Toolserver from Wikimedia Deutschland is Silke Meyer