benkurtovic.com/_posts/2011-08-05-earwigbot-progress-wiki-toolset.md

layout	title	description
post	EarwigBot Progress: Wiki Toolset	YAWTF (Yet Another Wiki Tools Framework, or Yet Another... WTF?)

Update Aug 08, 2011: Some changes made thanks to updates in the new feature/tests-framework branch.

So I’ve been spending the past week and a half working on EarwigBot’s new wikitools framework thing (to avoid confusion with Mr.Z-man’s python-wikitools package, I’m referring to it as “EarwigBot’s Wiki Toolset” in the docs, even though it’s just wiki internally). Basically, it’s the interface between EarwigBot and the MediaWiki API.

As Josh put it, this is “the thing that actually makes it work”.

So, now you can do this (from within Python’s interpreter, a wiki bot task, or an IRC command):

{% highlight pycon %}

import wiki site = wiki.get_site() print site.name() enwiki print site.project() wikipedia print site.lang() en print site.domain() en.wikipedia.org

{% endhighlight %}

Our config.json file stores site information, along with our chosen “default site”. Pretty neat, huh? “But what can it actually do?” I hear you ask? Well, for example, we can get information about users:

{% highlight pycon %}

user = site.get_user(“The Earwig”) print user.editcount() 11079 print user.groups() [u’*', u’user’, u’autoconfirmed’, u’abusefilter’, u’sysop’] reg = user.registration() import time print time.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S”, reg) Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:51:34

{% endhighlight %}

and pages as well, with intelligent namespace logic:

{% highlight pycon %}

page = site.get_page(“Wikipedia:Articles for creation”) print page.url() http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation print page.creator() Uncle G print page.namespace() 4 print site.namespace_id_to_name(4) Wikipedia print site.namespace_id_to_name(4, all=True) [u’Wikipedia’, u’Project’, u’WP’] print page.is_talkpage() False

talkpage = page.toggle_talk() print talkpage.title() Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation print talkpage.is_talkpage() True

{% endhighlight %}

and with support for redirect following:

{% highlight pycon %}

page = site.get_page(“Main page”) print page.is_redirect() True print page.get() #REDIRECT Main Page Category:Protected redirects Category:Main Page print page.get_redirect_target() Main Page

page = site.get_page(“Main page”, follow_redirects=True) print page.is_redirect() False # would only be True if “Main page” is a double redirect print page.get()

{| id="mp-topbanner” style="width:100%; background:#f9f9f9; margin:1.2em 0 6px 0; border:1px solid #ddd;” | style="width:61%; color:#000;” | ...

{% endhighlight %}

Of course, a Wiki Toolset would be nothing without login! Our username and password are stored (encrypted with Blowfish) in the bot’s config.json file, and we login automatically whenever we create a new Site object – unless we’re already logged in, of course, and we know that based on whether we have valid login cookies.

{% highlight pycon %}

user = site.get_user() # gets the logged-in user print user.name() EarwigBot

{% endhighlight %}

Cookies are stored in a special .cookies file in the project root (with no access given to other users, of course). We support both per-project login and CentralAuth, meaning I can do...

{% highlight pycon %}

es = wiki.get_site(“eswiki”) print es.get_user().name() EarwigBot

{% endhighlight %}

without making additional logins. One thing I strove for when designing the toolset was as minimal API usage as possible – we accept gzipped data, we don’t make API queries unless they’re actually requested, and we combine queries whenever possible. Of course, I’m probably doing it all wrong, but it seems to be working so far.

So... yeah. Carry on then!

—earwig