Toolhub/Progress reports/2021-10-08

Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2021-10-08.

Crawler working in production edit

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T292027 resolved

Trial and error have payed off! Bryan was able to get the crawler's Kubernetes CronJob working this week. The main issue that was found following last week's https_proxy realization was the need for an envoy "sidecar" container in the Job's pod to manage connections to various services in the cluster. Once this was added everything began working as hoped... mostly. We also found that the needed sidecar confuses the Kubernetes scheduler because the container running envoy keeps running after the container running the job has completed. The running container prevents Kubernetes from cleaning up the Job's pod. A quick fix of setting the CronJob configuration to use concurrencyPolicy: Replace has been applied. Giuseppe Lavagetto has a good idea about a better long term fix for the issue that we will be following up on in the weeks to come.

Metawiki help documents edit

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T275907 resolved

The {{Draft}} marker template has been removed from the new Toolhub main page and the content is ready for translations. More help documentation will continue to be added over time, but we have what we hope is a good start on them for our initial users. Everyone is encouraged to help improve the documentation. Don't let the translation markup scare you away. :)

Help documentation for folks wishing to develop their own tools using the Toolhub API are still needed. We also would like to have better on-wiki documentation for developers who would like to contribute to Toolhub itself.

Deploy date picked! edit

We have chosen Wednesday 2021-10-13 as the official launch date for Toolhub. The team is now working on drafting emails and other announcement messages to send to the Wikimedia community on that day and in the days following to promote the project widely.

Wrap up edit

It has been a long journey from a skeleton project in September 2020 to getting everything working in the production Kubernetes cluster this past week. Next week we will announce the official Toolhub URL and it's features to the entire Wikimedia movement. This closes the initial chapter of the project, but is really just the start of making Toolhub the project that the movement has asked for and deserves. Bryan would like to thank everyone, and there have been many of you, who has helped keep the project alive and progressing over the past year and beyond. The team is very excited for the conversations and work to come as we continue to build this project together.