6. Development

To contribute to the development of XTools, you may fork us on GitHub. A few things to be aware of first:

  1. XTools is based on Symfony 3. We use Twig as our template engine. Symfony is a full MVC system. a. The controllers are located at src/AppBundle/controller. They are sorted by tool. b. The twig templates are located at app/resources/views. They are sorted by tool.
  2. We use the @Route syntax to configure routes.
  3. Every tool requires a twig directory and one controller. Also, core parts of XTools require the tool to be registered within app/config/tools.yml.

6.1. Style Guidelines

  • It’s called “XTools”, with two capital letters.
  • XTools conforms to PSR2 coding standards; use ./vendor/bin/phpcs to check your code.
  • Functions and routes must begin with the tool name.
  • Version numbers follow Semantic Versioning guidelines.

6.2. Running Development server

First make sure you meet the Pre-requisites, and then follow these steps:

  1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/x-tools/xtools.git && cd xtools
  2. Run composer install and answer all the prompts.
  3. Create a new local database: ./bin/console doctrine:database:create (or d:d:c).
  4. Run the database migrations: ./bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate (or d:m:m)
  5. Launch PHP’s built-in server: ./bin/console server:run (or s:r).
  6. Visit http://localhost:8000 in your web browser.
  7. You can stop the server with ./bin/console server:stop (or s:s)

The Simple Counter is the simplest tool and should work as soon as you set up XTools. Test it by going to http://localhost:8000/sc and put in Jimbo Wales as the Username and en.wikipedia.org as the Wiki. After submitting you should quickly get results.

The development server does not cache data; any changes you make are visible after refreshing the page. When you edit the app/config/parameters.yml file, you’ll need to clear the cache with ./bin/console c:c.

Assets can be dumped with ./bin/console assetic:dump, and if you’re actively editing them you can continually watch for changes with ./bin/console assetic:watch.

The logs are in var/logs/dev.log. If things are acting up unexpectedly, you might try clearing the cache or restarting the server.

6.3. Developing against WMF databases

If you want to use the WMF database replicas, open two tunnels with:

ssh -L 4711:enwiki.labsdb:3306 tools-login.wmflabs.org -N -l your-username-here
ssh -L 4712:tools.labsdb:3306 tools-login.wmflabs.org -N -l your-username-here

And set the following in app/config/parameters.yml:

app.is_labs: 1
database_replica_host: 127.0.0.1
database_replica_port: 4711
database_replica_name: meta_p
database_meta_name: meta_p
database_replica_user: your-uxxxx-username-here
database_replica_password: your-password-here
database_toolsdb_host: 127.0.0.1
database_toolsdb_port: 4712
database_toolsdb_name: toollabs_p

(Change the your-*-here bits to your own values, which you can find in your replica.my.cnf file on Tool Labs.)

6.4. Table mappings

Tool Labs has different versions of tables that utilize indexing to improve performance. We’ll want to take advantage of that.

  • Go to the config directory with cd app/config

  • Create the file table_map.yml from the template: cp table_map.yml.dist table_map.yml

  • Set the contents of the file to the following:

    parameters:
      app.table.archive: 'archive_userindex'
      app.table.revision: 'revision_userindex'
      app.table.logging: 'logging_logindex'
    

Sometimes we want <code>logging_userindex</code> and not the logindex. This is handled in the code via the <code>getTableName()</code> function in [https://github.com/x-tools/xtools/blob/master/src/Xtools/Repository.php#L144 Repository.php].

6.5. Caching

Caching should happen in helpers, with appropriate times-to-live.

Every helper should extend HelperBase, which has cacheHas(), cacheGet(), and cacheSave() methods. These should be used in this pattern:

public function doSomething($input)
{
    $cacheKey = 'something.'.$input;
    if ($this->cacheHas($cacheKey)) {
        return $this->cacheGet($cacheKey);
    }
    $something = 'big query here';
    $this->cacheSave($cacheKey, $something, 'P1D');
    return $something;
}

The cache key can be anything, so long as it is unique within the current class (the cache*() methods prepend the classname, so you don’t have to). The TTL syntax is from the DateInterval class (e.g. P1D is one day, PT1H is one hour).

The above methods are just wrappers around a PSR-6 implementation, intended to reduce the repetition of similar lines of code. You can, of course, retrieve the underlying CacheItemPoolInterface whenever you want with $container->get('cache.app').

6.6. Writing the docs

We use ReadTheDocs; it’s great.

To build this documentation locally, you need python-sphinx installed, as well as the sphinx_rtd_theme theme.

Then, it’s simply a matter of runnign make html in the docs/ directory, and browsing to xtools/docs/_build/html/ to view the documentation.

Documentation sections use the following (standard Python) hierarchy of section symbols:

  • # with overline for parts
  • * with overline for chapters
  • = for sections
  • - for subsections

6.7. Releases

Before tagging a new release:

  • update the version numbers in docs/conf.py and app/config/version.yml;
  • check the copyright year in README.md, docs/conf.py, and app/Resources/views/base.html.twig;
  • if assets were modified, bump the version number in config.yml under framework/assets/version; and
  • update RELEASE_NOTES.md with any notable new information for the end user.

Then tag the release (follow the Semantic Versioning guidelines, and annotate the tag with the above release notes) and push it to GitHub.

Lastly, update the version and updated parameters at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/XTools

6.8. Additional Help

Please contact User:Matthewrbowker or User:MusikAnimal if you need help. Or, you are welcome to visit us on IRC (Direct link - Requires an IRC client).