Release Engineering/Drafts/Deployments/How to become a deployer

Members of the Wikimedia technical community are welcome - and encouraged! - to become deployers of MediaWiki and its extensions. Deploying is a serious responsibility which involves risk to production, so there are some prerequisites.

Access

First, you'll need access to the relevant systems.

• Production access, and in particular membership in the deployment group
• Access to merge changes in wmf deploy branches (including mediawiki-config) by being added to the wmf-deployments Gerrit group (must first have deployment membership)
  • Ask an existing wmf-deployments group member to do this.

Communications

Next, you need to be connected and aware of several communication streams.

• Join (and read) the operations mailing list (ops@lists.wikimedia.org)
  • Announcements that could impact how and/or when to deploy things are primarily sent there.
• Be present on IRC
  • Join the #wikimedia-operations ^connect IRC channel
    • This is where real-time communications and alerting about the state of production happen
    • This is where you'll communicate about ongoing deploys
  • Other useful channels include #wikimedia-tech ^connect, #wikimedia-sre ^connect, and #wikimedia-releng ^connect

Training

Finally, learn how to deploy.

Release Engineering hosts regular meetings for triaging production error logs, and conducts training on how to do backport deploys. Please attend at least one of each session, and pair with an experienced deployer on your first few deploys.

(This section to be expanded into something actually useful for the seeker-of-deploy-rights.)