A team maintaining shared reference material needs pages that several people can edit without losing earlier versions. MediaWiki provides that wiki application, including linked pages, editing history and uploaded media. It turns content stored in a database and files into a website people can maintain together. Running it on Kubernetes still requires preserving that content and checking extensions and themes when upgrading, rather than treating the web container as the whole wiki.
Current guidance
MediaWiki’s official upgrade guide requires checking release requirements, backing up files and the database, upgrading extensions and running the database update process. It also documents bounded upgrade paths: sufficiently old installations need intermediate releases rather than an arbitrary direct jump to the newest code.
Inventory LocalSettings.php, extensions, skins, uploaded media and scheduled maintenance tasks alongside the database. Check PHP and database compatibility for the selected MediaWiki release and verify that custom extensions have matching versions. A chart’s appVersion does not establish compatibility of independently installed wiki extensions.
Rehearse the upgrade on a restored copy and test editing, revision history, login, uploads and background jobs before exposing it. Keep a consistent pre-upgrade backup because schema changes may prevent the old application from safely using the upgraded database. Ensure multiple web replicas share the required durable files and configuration. This review provides the official migration boundaries; it does not certify a particular extension set or claim that the historical Kubernetes package is currently supported.
Historical upstream link check · 2026-10-09
The recorded upstream address responded successfully (HTTP 200) on 2026-10-09. Link availability does not certify the historical installation instructions or current security support.
Website availability is separate from project, chart and image support. Use the current guidance and primary sources on this page to assess the distribution.
Historical Kubedex content
Preserved for context. Commands, versions, prices and results below reflect the original research.
MediaWiki is a free server-based software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day.
MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation that uses PHP to process and display data stored in a database, such as MySQL.
Pages use MediaWiki’s wikitext format so that users without knowledge of HTML or CSS can edit them easily.
When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with proxy server software.
MediaWiki is:
- feature-rich and extensible, both on-wiki and with hundreds of extensions;
- scalable and suitable for both small and large sites;
- simple to install, working on most hardware/software combinations; and
- available in your language.
Prerequisites
- Kubernetes 1.4+ with Beta APIs enabled
- PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure
Get involved
Do you love software freedom and open source communities? Do you like the MediaWiki software, Wikipedia, or any other Wikimedia sites?
Then, contribute your skills here and learn from other contributors. This page will help you get started by providing an overview of areas where you can get involved.
Web APIs
The content of all Wikimedia projects is released under free licenses. Write code to access, remix and grow this immense pool of free knowledge. Follow the tutorial to get started with the API, available on all MediaWiki wikis, and other APIs for content and Wikidata. Other open data sources, including XML and SQL dumps, are also available.
Software Development
Our code is all free and open source. Choose a project, provide a patch, and fix a task!
Wikimedia projects use a variety of languages such as PHP and JavaScript in MediaWiki and its extensions, Lua (in Templates), CSS/LESS (in skins etc), Objective-C, Swing and Java (in Mobile Apps and Kiwix), Python (in Pywikibot), C++ (in Huggle), or C# (in AWB).
Create bots to process content and host your tools on Toolforge. Hack on mobile apps or on desktop applications. Or help Site Reliability Engineering maintain the server configuration.
Testing
Help improve the quality of our projects through automated browser testing and continuous integration. Report your first bug or help with existing bug reports.
Ambassadors
As a Tech ambassador, help other Wikimedians with technical issues, relay Tech News to inform users about what is going to impact them, and join the ambassadors’ group and the mailing list to act as a bridge between developers and your local wiki.
Documentation
English writers can improve the MediaWiki documentation, other essential support pages and, in fact, any page of this website.
Translation
If you are fluent in a language other than English you can join the effort by translating this website and the MediaWiki software.
Support
Help users and developers looking for answers at the support desk or the MediaWiki communication and social media channels.
Design
Help apply the Wikimedia design principles in projects looking for UX feedback.
Meet up
Meet other community members online or in person.
More helpful information
Communication
There are several ways you can get into contact with the Wikimedia community.
- Feel free to ask your developer questions on https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org.
- For real-time communication use #wikimedia-devconnect on IRC (Internet Relay Chat).
- There are also several e-mail lists for discussion of Wikimedia software. A complete list is available.
- You can also follow and share Wikimedia news across your social network.
- You can also subscribe to Tech News to receive a weekly summary on your user talk page of recent software changes, without technical jargon.
Sources & further reading
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