Change Details

Wikimedia's URL-routing logic straddles five layers: Varnish, Apache, the file system, multiwiki, and MediaWiki code. This makes the URL dispatching patterns harder to discern and harder still to reason about, and it couples it tightly to a particular software stack. This is a problem for other users of MediaWiki, too: anyone who spent a bit of time fielding questions on `#mediawiki` knows that users often naively expect pretty URLs to work out of the box, and they are confused when we send them away to tinker with `mod_rewrite` rules. Let's replace all that cruft by picking a good URL dispatcher library and by gradually making it MediaWiki's exclusive web entry-point.

Wikimedia's URL-routing logic straddles five layers: Varnish, Apache, the file system, multiwiki, and MediaWiki code. This makes the URL dispatching patterns harder to discern and harder still to reason about, and it couples us tightly to a particular software stack. It's a problem for other users of MediaWiki, too: anyone who has spent a bit of time fielding questions on `#mediawiki` knows that users often naively expect pretty URLs to work out of the box, and they are confused when we send them away to tinker with `mod_rewrite` rules. Let's replace all that cruft by picking a good URL dispatcher library and by gradually making it MediaWiki's exclusive web entry-point.

Wikimedia's URL-routing logic straddles five layers: Varnish, Apache, the file system, multiwiki, and MediaWiki code. This makes the URL dispatching patterns harder to discern and harder still to reason about, and it couples itus tightly to a particular software stack. This isIt's a problem for other users of MediaWiki, too: anyone who has spent a bit of time fielding questions on `#mediawiki` knows that users often naively expect pretty URLs to work out of the box, and they are confused when we send them away to tinker with `mod_rewrite` rules. Let's replace all that cruft by picking a good URL dispatcher library and by gradually making it MediaWiki's exclusive web entry-point.