Wikimore

Group:	Developer Experience
Start:	2012-03-01
Lead:	Levi Ferreira

The Beta Cluster is a functional, production-like environment in the Cloud VPS that is suitable for final-stage testing of new features. It was initially created as a way to provide an exact copy of the WMF production cluster (including db hosts, apaches, logging, squids, varnish caching, image scalers, etc.) using Cloud VPS instances.

Current Status

Beta Cluster remains a significant part of MediaWiki's development ecosystem, serving as a pre-production environment to test and deploy code before it reaches production, reshaped its purpose and management but is largely unmaintained.

In 2024, the Developer Experience group took Product Stewardship of Beta Cluster^[1] and are currently focused on giving it clear direction and narrowing its use cases. The long-term goal is to transform the Beta Cluster into a Playground environment for experimentation and testing without replicating every aspect of production. As part of this effort, the team is also working actively on tools like PatchDemo/Catalyst to ensure the most common use cases of Beta are covered as on-demand isolated testing environments. While this transformation is ongoing, the team is prioritizing only very essential updates (E.g. PHP 8.1 Upgrade) and not addressing smaller issues in its current state.

Developer Experience encourage users of Beta Cluster to submit a feature request in Phabricator if their requirements are not adequately addressed yet by PatchDemo/Catalyst or other tools. Their input will guide improvements and help prioritize features.

How it works

It runs off git master and has its MediaWiki core and extensions code updated about every ten minutes. Beta Cluster is one of the Wikimedia test wikis. It uses its own SUL login separate from production, so for example an account for en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org also works on en.wikisource.beta.wmflabs.org but not on any production wiki.

See the overview of its configuration.

Open tasks

Open tasks can be found in the workboard in Phabricator. Those task are currently used as a way to catalogue issues or recurring problems, but are not addressed or observed immediately.

Testing changes on Beta Cluster

See Deploy to Beta Cluster for deployment steps.

Logs from the Beta Cluster are sent to Logstash and can be seen at beta-logs.wmcloud.org. This site is currently password-protected, for an account look in: ssh deployment-deploy04.deployment-prep.eqiad1.wikimedia.cloud sudo cat /root/secrets.txt. If for your EventLogging events aren't showing up in the dashboard, maybe check the logs and database for possible problems. If that's not working, maybe eventlogging and / or the machine needs to be rebooted. Ping the folks in #wmf-analytics ^connect.

If you need to run a maintenance script on the Beta Cluster, ssh to deployment-deploy04.deployment-prep.eqiad1.wikimedia.cloud (proxying through bastion.wmcloud.org).

If you need user rights on a beta cluster wiki, use the createAndPromote.php maintenance script (see above for running maintenance scripts) to promote your account. If you don't have shell access, file a task in Phabricator. Note that certain permissions, such as interface administrator and checkuser, require your account to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled, just like in production.

If you need to check the databases, they're hosted on machines with the name *dbXX* among the ones listed here: https://openstack-browser.toolforge.org/project/deployment-prep.

If you just need to run some queries, ssh to deployment-deploy04.deployment-prep.eqiad1.wikimedia.cloud and run sql testwiki or with any other dbname you need.

Stash messages to the beta cluster's server admin log by using the prefix "!log " in #wikimedia-releng.