Right now our main third party distribution process is to tell people to manually download a tar/zip file and expand it locally, and set everything else (LAMP) up around it. I think we'd serve potential users better if we also gave them the option of a standalone containerised image that handled a lot of the technology selection and configuration choices for them.
The Wikibase team did a lot of work on Wikibase Release Strategy and we should learn from them.
Open questions
- What container? Docker?
- What technology selections would we make?
- How would we propagate upstream security fixes?
- Would this cover persistent data storage, or would users need to provide that externally?
- What would the upgrade process be like?