Help:Getting Started

Overview

Wikimedia Cloud Services provides tools, services, and support for technical collaborators who want to contribute to Wikimedia software projects.

This page outlines the accounts you will need and basic first steps, which will allow you to contribute to this wiki and Wikimedia's technical spaces, including:

• Toolforge
• Cloud VPS Projects
• Gerrit

You will learn how to:

• Join an existing project or begin a new project.
• Add members or admins to projects.
• Create and configure instances within a project.
• Find help and ways to participate.

Set up your accounts

To access and contribute to Cloud Services projects and tools, you will need the following accounts. Please note, these are two distinct accounts:

• Wikimedia account - this account is used to contribute to Wikipedia and its sister projects.
  • When you create your Wikimedia account, you will create a username and password.
• Wikimedia developer account - this account is used to log into this wiki, Toolforge, Cloud VPS, Gerrit and other protected Wikimedia Services.
  • When you create your Wikimedia developer account, you will create a username (sometimes called LDAP username), UNIX shell username, and password.

Get started with Toolforge

1. Submit a Toolforge project membership request.
2. Wait for membership approval.
   • Your request will be reviewed, and you will receive confirmation within a week. You will be notified through your Wikitech user account that you have been added to the project Nova Resource:Tools.
   • Once you are added as a Toolforge member you must logout and then login again at https://toolsadmin.wikimedia.org/ for your membership to take effect.
3. Access the Toolforge project.
   • Use your "UNIX shell username" provided when creating your developer account and the SSH private key matching the public key you supplied for authentication.

For more information about accessing the project, please see Using Toolforge and managing your files.

Get started with Cloud VPS Projects

Join an existing project

1. Choose a project to join with OpenStack browser.
2. Request membership by creating a Phabricator task and assigning it directly to the project administrator(s).
   • You can find the list of project admins by going to http://tools.wmflabs.org/openstack-browser/project/<project-name>.

Create a new project

1. Follow the instructions on the "Cloud-VPS (Project-requests)" phabricator task.

Add members and admin users to a project

Project admins can use the following steps to add new members or grant administrative permissions to members.

1. Go to Special:NovaProject.
2. Use Add member link to add new members.
3. Use Add member link for the projectadmin role in the Role column.
   • Log at #wikimedia-cloud ^connect that you added/granted admin to the member.

Learn about project instances

To learn more about project instances, read the project instances documentation.

Log your actions

It is best practice to log changes to all instances of your project.

Wikimedia Cloud Services provides a Server Admin Log for users to log their project server administration actions on.

You can add a log entry in the #wikimedia-cloud ^connect channel on Freenode by using the sending a message like: !log <projectname> <message>

See Tool:Stashbot for more information.

Get started with Gerrit

Gerrit is Wikimedia's code review system.

Once you have created your Wikimedia account and Wikimedia developer account, including your UNIX shell username, follow the instructions in the Gerrit tutorial to get started.

Communication and support

Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation Cloud Services team and Wikimedia movement volunteers. Please reach out with questions and join the conversation:

Discuss and receive general support

• Chat in real time in the IRC channel #wikimedia-cloud ^connect or the bridged Telegram group
• Discuss via email after you have subscribed to the cloud@ mailing list

Stay aware of critical changes and plans

• Subscribe to the cloud-announce@ mailing list (all messages are also mirrored to the cloud@ list)
• Read the News wiki page

Track work tasks and report bugs

Use a subproject of the #Cloud-Services Phabricator project to track confirmed bug reports and feature requests about the Cloud Services infrastructure itself

Read stories and WMCS blog posts

Read the Cloud Services Blog (for the broader Wikimedia movement, see the Wikimedia Technical Blog)

See also

• At-a-Glance: Cloud VPS and Toolforge