For context, see the previous blog post, Sonali's Internship work on the Free Software Directory, part 2

After much work, I finally completed the upgrade of the Directory from the previous long term support version of MediaWiki, 1.27, to the current one, 1.31, which was released shortly after my internship started. I also made some general improvements.

• I downloaded the Semantic MediaWiki extensions using composer;
• I removed deprecated code in LocalSettings.php;
• I ported the customizations to Vector skin to the new version;
• I improved the search bar by placing it in the right navigation panel instead of the sidebar;
• I added the FSF favicon; and
• I spent about a week fixing bugs in the CASAuth and HeaderTabs extensions.

Upgrading the mobile site took more work, and after some testing I decided to switch from the MobileFrontend extension to the mobile friendly Timeless skin along with MobileDetect.

I recorded the shell commands required to set up the server and translated them to ansible commands. Since I was unfamiliar with ansible and yaml, I took some time to learn about it.

Then we performed the final migration. Andrew (my mentor) gave me the latest MySQL dump from the directory and made the old site read-only. I imported it to the new server and ran the upgrade script. Then he migrated the DNS. There were a few small hiccups, but after a few hours, the upgrade was complete.

It was my first internship and my first experience of working in a free software community, and I grew very attached to it. My mentors were very experienced and responsive. I was able to learn a lot from them. I am grateful that I got the opportunity to associate with such an amazing organization. Thanks to Outreachy organizers for giving me a great way to work for a distinguished organization and to develop my skills. Lastly, a big thanks to my mentors, Andrew and Ian, who helped me all along and made my internship a truly incredible experience!