Manual:Pywikibot/Installation

On PAWS

PAWS: A Web Shell is the easiest way to get started with Pywikibot. No installation is necessary, and you use a web interface to submit commands.

Running Pywikibot on PAWS

On your own computer

Below is a manual to help you set Pywikibot up and running on your own computer. There are four main steps to this process:

• Installing Python
• Installing Pywikibot
• Configuring Pywikibot
• Running a script

On Toolforge

Toolforge provides you with a stable cloud infrastructure on Wikimedia servers that allows you to run bots continuously or on a schedule.

Running Pywikibot on Toolforge

Download and install Python from https://www.python.org/downloads/.

If you already have Python installed, check if your version is recent enough by running python --version in a console. If you have Python 2.7.4 or higher, or Python 3.4 or higher installed, your version of Python is recent enough.

An additional package named requests is required to run Pywikibot. Use pip, which is already installed if you have Python 2.7.9 or higher, or Python 3.4 or higher. Run the following command to install this package:

pip install requests

Download current Pywikibot stable branch: .tar.gz, .zip.

Unpack downloaded file, for example in ~/pywikibot or C:\Users\username\pywikibot.

Alternatively, you may retrieve the latest version using git or svn client from Gerrit, see Manual:Pywikibot/Gerrit#For users . This is the recommended way for active bot operators and developers to use Pywikibot.

Other versions are available at https://tools.wmflabs.org/pywikibot/.

Keep your bot framework up to date. New versions are released continuously, and are available at the same location.

If you are using git or svn release, you may skip this note. Otherwise please be aware of a necessity to backup your configuration files and scripts (user-config.py, any family file, or custom script that you might have created or changed, and any current XML dump file you're using for a wiki) before installing a new release.

Unpack the new version over the old version, overwriting all files.

Open Terminal on Unix-like (Linux/BSD/Solaris) or Command Prompt on Windows (typically under Windows System or Accessories folders in All apps or All programs menu inside the Start menu), and change directory to where you unpacked Pywikibot:

Unix-like (Linux/BSD/Solaris):

cd ~/pywikibot

Windows:

c:
cd "\Users\username\pywikibot"

Of course substitute the location to where you unpacked Pywikibot.

Continue with the following command to generate user configuration file:

python pwb.py generate_user_files

Follow the prompts to configure Pywikibot.

Finally run the following command to log in to your wiki:

python pwb.py login

Pywikibot is pre-configured for a large number of wikis, but possibly not for the one you want to work on. See Manual:Pywikibot/Use on third-party wikis for how to configure Pywikibot for your wiki.

Pywikibot provides a wide range of configuration options to change the behavior of your bot. You can change these settings in the file user-config.py. See config2.py for a list of all parameters you can use.

Pywikibot comes packaged with a large number of scripts in the scripts directory. You can run all of these using:

python pwb.py [name of the script]

A list of all scripts is available at Manual:Pywikibot/Scripts .

Most scripts do not require additional packages, but a few of them will not work without. These are listed in requirements.txt together with their dependencies.

To install dependencies for some script, use pip, and run the following command:

pip install [name of the package]

Alternatively, run the following command to install all dependencies for all scripts at once:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you need more help on setting up your Pywikibot visit the #pywikibot IRC channel ^connect or pywikibot@ mailing list.