Planet.wikimedia.org

Blog aggregator of planet.*.org fame; http://planetplanet.org for the software

Installation

On singer currently, installed from a nightly snapshot of planet 2.0.

Runs on http://planet.wikimedia.org/ CNAME

Policy

Not 100% determined who will manage. Brion and Erik probably involved to some degree.

Config

Config file and theme is in svn:

• http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/tools/planet

Can be svn up'd on bart in /usr/local/planet/wikimedia. Hourly cronjob will update the live copy.

How to set up a language subdomain

• Add directory & configuration file in SVN tools/planet if not yet present
• Add language to the updater script on singer (/usr/local/planet/update-wikimedia)
  • wait for hourly cronjob to update or run it manually as user 'planet'
• Add CNAME for lang.planet.wikimedia.org to wikimedia.org DNS
• Add entry to Apache 2.2 config on singer (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/planet.wikimedia.org)
• Restart Apache 2.2 on singer

How to recover in a hurry

• Get Planet source
• Untar it in /usr/local/planet
• svn co http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/tools/planet wikimedia
• Make a docroot for planet.wikimedia.org
• (Check file permissions on dirs)
• Generate all required locales (see config.ini for each language)
• Set up a cronjob that runs planet on the various language configs
  • fixme: put this script in svn too?

If Planet stops updating

It happens that the updating process will stop and cause the feeds not to be updated anymore.

It seems like the cache can get corrupted and lead the python script in charge of updating the feeds to crash and prevent the update from happening (as well as creating threads on the server that fail to properly close).

In order to see the problem, you will have to manually run /bin/sh /usr/local/planet/update-wikimedia or python /usr/local/planet/planet.py /usr/local/planet/wikimedia/LANG/config.ini if you know which LANG is not updating. If there is a problem, you should see a stack trace, with the last line ressembling something like

• KeyError: 'http://www.mw.net.tw/user/kaurjmeb/blog/2008/02/21/28420/78160/ content type'

To fix the issue, simply remove the cached data located in /usr/local/planet/wikimedia/LANG/cache/BLOG_NAME and run the process again.

NOTE: Make sure to run the above mentioned scripts as user planet, or the file permissions in the cache will be switched to root, causing all kinds of issues when updating.