Rewrite/Conversion HOWTO

This is a guide to converting from version 1 of the Pywikipediabot framework to version 2.

Most importantly, note that the version 2 framework only supports wikis using MediaWiki v.1.14 or higher software. If you need to access a wiki that uses older software, you should continue using version 1 for this purpose.

Contents 1 Installation 1.1 Python libraries 1.2 User files 2 Converting scripts 3 Page objects 3.1 ImagePage objects 3.2 Category objects

Installation

The rewrite branch can be installed from the SVN server at svn.wikimedia.org (in the directory pywikipediabot/branches/rewrite), or from the nightly snapshots available at http://toolserver.org/~valhallasw/pywiki/

Make sure that the root of the rewrite package (the files you just installed in the previous step) and the "pywikibot" directory in that package are both in your PYTHONPATH environment value, and that the "scripts" directory is in your PATH if you want to run scripts from any working directory.

Python libraries

The rewrite branch requires Python 2.5 or 2.6.

[Note: the goal will be to package pywikibot with setuptools easy_install, so that these dependencies will be loaded automatically when the package is installed, and users won't need to worry about this...]

You will also need the httplib2, simplejson, and setuptools packages--

• httplib2  : http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/
• setuptools : http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools/
• simplejson : http://svn.red-bean.com/bob/simplejson/tags/simplejson-1.7.1/docs/index.html

or, if you already have setuptools installed, just execute 'easy_install httplib2' and 'easy_install simplejson' [Note that simplejson is only required for Python 2.5 users, since the equivalent capability is built-in to 2.6.]

If you run into errors involving httplib2.urlnorm, update httplib2 to 0.4.0 (Ubuntu package python-httlib2, for example, is outdated). Note that httplib2 will run under Python 2.6, but will emit DeprecationWarnings (which are annoying but don't affect the ability to use the package).

User files

In most cases, an existing user-config.py that is being used with the old framework should work unchanged with the rewrite branch. You will need to copy that file into a user directory. To use the default path, try to run "python config2.py" in the directory in which you installed the package; you will get an error message that looks something like "RuntimeError: No user-config.py found in directory 'C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\pywikibot'." (The default directory name is different on non-Windows systems.) Just put your user-config.py in the directory given by that message. If you don't like the default, the specific path to the user directory can be changed by setting the environment variable PYWIKIBOT2_DIR in your shell. You can also copy existing 'passwords' and 'user-fixes.py' files, if you have them, to this directory.

Converting scripts

The root namespace used in the project has changed from "wikipedia" to "pywikibot". References to wikipedia need to be changed globally to pywikibot. Unless noted in this document, other names have not changed; for example, wikipedia.Page can be replaced by pywikibot.Page throughout any bot. An effort has been made to design the interface to be as backwards- compatible as possible, so that in most cases it should be possible to convert scripts to the new interface simply by changing import statements and doing global search-and-replace on module names, as discussed in this document.

With pywikipedia scripts were importing "wikipedia" or "pagegenerators" libraries; pywikibot is now written as a standard package, and other modules are contained within it (e.g., pywikibot.site contains Site classes). However, most commonly-used names are imported into the pywikibot namespace, so that module names don't need to be used unless specified in the documentation.

The following changes, at a minimum, need to be made to allow scripts to run:

   change "import wikipedia" to "import pywikibot"
   change "import pagegenerators" to "from pywikibot import pagegenerators"
   change "import config" to "from pywikibot import config"
   change "import catlib" to "from pywikibot import catlib"
   change "wikipedia." to "pywikibot."

After converting, it is recommended to run your script in debug mode (for example, python myscript.py -debug) and review the (lengthy) output in the log file (which will be found in the same user directory that contains user-config.py, under the name myscript-bot.log) to see if your script is using deprecated methods or giving other warning messages.

Page objects

The constructor syntax for Pages has been modified; existing calls in the format of Page(site, title) will still work, and this is still the preferred way of creating a Page object.

A second syntax allows creating a Page from a Link object (more on this below), which handles link parsing and interpretation that doesn't require access to the wiki server.

A third syntax allows easy conversion from a Page object to an ImagePage or Category, or vice versa: for example, Category(pageobj) converts a Page to a Category, as long as the page is in the category namespace.

The site attribute of Page objects has been changed from a method to a property. This means that any code that uses p.site() on a Page object p needs to be changed to use p.site instead.

The following methods of the Page object have been deprecated (deprecated methods still work, but print a warning message in debug mode):

urlname()

replaced by Page.title(asUrl=True)

titleWithoutNamespace()

replaced by Page.title(withNamespace=False)

sectionFreeTitle()

replaced by Page.title(withSection=False)

aslink()

replaced by Page.title(asLink=True)

encoding()

replaced by Page.site().encoding()

The following methods of the Page object have been obsoleted and no longer work (but these methods don't appear to be used anywhere in the code distributed with the bot framework). The functionality of the two obsolete methods is easily replaced by using standard search-and-replace techniques. If you call them, they will print a warning and do nothing else:

• removeImage()
• replaceImage()

ImagePage objects

For ImagePage objects, the getFileMd5Sum() method is deprecated; it is recommended to replace it with getFileSHA1Sum(), because MediaWiki now stores the SHA1 hash of images.

Category objects

The Category object has been moved from the catlib module to the pywikibot namespace. Any references to "catlib.Category" can be replaced by "pywikibot.Category", but the old form is retained for backwards-compatibility.

For Category objects, the following methods are deprecated:

subcategoriesList

use, for example, list(self.subcategories()) instead

articlesList

use, for example, list(self.articles()) instead

supercategories

use self.categories() instead

supercategoriesList

use, for example, list(self.categories()) instead

MORE TO COME