Developer Satisfaction Survey/2025/Developer environments
📖 Developer Satisfaction 2025 Report
🧑💻 Developer Environments
tl;dr
- ↑ Satisfaction – Respondents are satisfied with Docker-based environments, much like last year with some improvements.
- MediaWiki CLI "Very Satisfied" 8% → 26%
- MediaWiki CLI has continued making changes and improvements throughout the year
- MediaWiki Docker dissatisfaction 17% → 4%
- Earlier this year, folks added PHP8.3 to mw:MediaWiki-Docker.
- MediaWiki CLI "Very Satisfied" 8% → 26%
- Docker-based development environments are still missing the ability to make "wikifarms".
# Personal developer environments use
last year
Of the 153 who opted into this section of the survey, the majority (60%) said they do use a PDE for MediaWiki; 33% said they do not; and 8% were unsure.
# Personal development environment use by role
| Role | Use PDE for MediaWiki | Do not use PDE for MediaWiki | Unsure | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N | % | N | % | N | % | |
| MediaWiki Core developers, MediaWiki extension developers, and test engineers | 83 | 87% | 8 | 8% | 4 | 4% |
| Data engineers and and Service/API developers | 19 | 61% | 8 | 26% | 4 | 13% |
| Gadget developers | 35 | 53% | 24 | 37% | 6 | 9% |
| Tool developers | 40 | 49% | 37 | 46% | 4 | 5% |
| SRE/Infrastructure engineers | 7 | 41% | 9 | 53% | 1 | 6% |
# Personal development environment use by tenure
# MediaWiki development environments used
last year
Respondents could choose more than one answer.
Of the 103 who responded, almost half (49%) said they use MediaWiki Docker and 44% said they use a self-created environment.
# MediaWiki development environments used (by tenure)
Like last year, the most commonly used environment by respondents with 0-3 years tenure is MediaWiki Docker, while the most commonly used environments for respondents with 4+ years tenure is a self-created environment and Docker.
# Development environment satisfaction
last year
If people indicated they used an environment, we asked them how satisfied they were with that environment.
- 88% of respondents who use MediaWiki Docker are satisfied with their environment
- 87% of respondents who use MediaWiki CLI are satisfied with their environment
- 84% of respondents who use a self-created environment are satisfied with their environment
- 84% of respondents who use another environment are satisfied with their environment
- 40% of respondents who use MediaWiki Vagrant are satisfied with their environment
# Feedback
last year
Respondents touched on these themes.
Too many things
I would love there to be fewer semi-supported environments, so when helping people we're almost all starting from the same place
Wikifarm difficulty
MediaWiki-Docker does not make wikifarms and other non-trivial configuration management easy. MediaWiki-Vagrant worked hard to replace "read a wiki page" with deployment tooling, but that goal seems to have not carried forward into the defacto successor dev environment.