Planet.wikimedia.org

Revision as of 23:09, 24 January 2013

What is planet?

An RSS feed aggregator. See meta:Planet_Wikimedia for details.

How do i access it?

http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/ and several other languages, *.planet.wikimedia.org.

New planet (planet-venus)

On Jan,23rd 2013 we switched from the old planet (http://www.planetplanet.org/) to the new planet-venus (http://www.intertwingly.net/code/venus/)

What's better about the new planet?

1. It's packaged in Ubuntu. (planet-venus), the old planet was not packaged.
2. It's fully puppetized, the old planet was all manual.
3. It uses git. People adding feed URLs can just send Gerrit patchsets. The old planet used SVN.
4. It's a complete rewrite of the old code in Python. It uses more modern technology like html5lib, Atom, XSLT and templates.
5. ..

What may not be better about the new planet (yet)?

1. The "gmq" planet, which is a combo of Scandinavian languages does not have separate index pages in each language yet.
2. Some CSS/layout/design issues, like localized logo in Arabic or right-to-left alignment of thumbnails. (Arabic does already use a separate CSS file though and has the sidebar on the right hand side)
3. It does not include iframes (this might be considered a good thing though)

Where should i report issues?

On Bugzilla.

Where does it run?

On zirconium in eqiad. The old planet was on singer.

Where's the code?

In git, in the operations/puppet repo:

1. ./manifests/role/planet.pp
2. ./manifests/misc/planet.pp

and

1. git clone https://github.com/rubys/venus.git

How are planets being updated?

Puppet creates cron jobs, running as user "planet".

crontab -u planet -l
example:  0 0 * * * /usr/bin/planet -v /usr/share/planet-venus/wikimedia/de/config.ini > /var/log/planet/de-planet.log 2>&1

There is also /var/lib/planet/update-planets to update all planets at once. run with sudo -u planet though to not mess up permissions on log files.

How do i add/remove feed URLs?

1. Clone the operations/puppet git repository.
2. go to ./puppet/templates/planet/ and edit one of the <language>_config.erb files
3. submit to gerrit and have somebody merge it

How do i change HTML of the index pages?

1. see above, edit ./puppet/templates/planet/index.html.tmpl.erb

How do i add/change translations in the index pages or add a new language?

1. see above, edit ./puppet/manifests/role/planet.pp (find $planet_languages=...)

How do i request changes if i can't or don't want to submit a change set myself?

Ask on meta:Planet_Wikimedia#Requests_for_Update_or_Removal

Are there more general docs on planet-venus and it's architecture?

Sure, see docs and venus.svg.