reFill fixes bare URLs in Wikipedia articles. In other words, it turns refs that look like this...
<ref>https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260403-the-best-tv-shows-of-2026</ref>
into refs that look like this:
<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260403-the-best-tv-shows-of-2026|title=10 of the best TV shows of 2026 so far|date=April 7, 2026|website=www.bbc.com}}</ref>
ReFill does everything except publish the edit, including setting up an on-wiki diff of the edit for you to review. It is up to you, the user, to check the diff and make sure that the generated citation templates are accurate.
Front end (https://refill.toolforge.org/)
Our front end is written in the Vue.js JavaScript framework. It is fairly simple. The first screen asks for a wiki page or wikicode, then the second page loads that wikicode and sends it to the back end (https://refill-api.toolforge.org/) via an API query, then streams the response. The user can then click a button that takes them to Wikipedia to preview an edit containing ReFill's suggested changes.
The PHP webservice image uses /public_html/ as the entry point.
The entire website uses a URL rewrite rule in a .lighttpd.conf config file to redirect all traffic regardless of path to /index.html, which loads the Vue app, which has been minified by Webpack.
cd refill.toolforge.org/public_html
npm install
npm run dev
Then visit http://localhost:8087/
You will need to cancel (Ctrl-C) and then re-run npm run dev when modifying certain files (such as config.development.js).
Locally...
cd refill.toolforge.org/public_html
npm install
npm run build
Then...
- log into ToolForge
- delete all the files in the /public_html/ directory
- copy paste the contents of your local /dist/ directory into the /public_html/ directory
You may need to hard refresh your browser (Ctrl+F5) when visiting the front end right after a deploy.
There are efforts to write a deploy.sh script at T422570: create a deploy.sh script for the front end.
- Copy over the folder structure and settings files located in this repo's /refill.toolforge.org/ directory.
- Follow the "How to deploy" directions above.
- SSH into ToolForge and run the following commands to start the webserver:
ssh login.toolforge.org
become refill
webservice php8.4 start
Keep in mind that anytime you add/modify/delete the .lighttpd.conf file, you'll need to restart the webservice for the changes to take effect.
ssh login.toolforge.org
become refill
webservice restart
- wikEd diff - Last updated upstream in 2014. ReFill's copy is lightly modified.
Back end (https://refill-api.toolforge.org/)
The "scheduler": The ReFill API is a REST API running in Flask, a Python framework. It creates workers (see below).
The "worker": Python code that uses Celery and Redis to store and execute asynchronous jobs. The jobs get information about how to parse each URL from Wikimedia's Citoid API (https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/data/citation), which uses Zotero.
Kubernetes is used in production to spawn multiple processes: one for the scheduler and one for the worker. See worker-deployment.yml.
The Python webservice image uses /www/python/src/app.py as the web entry point, and loads libraries from /www/python/venv/. Unlike a PHP webservice, there is not a 1:1 mapping between files on the server and the URL. More info.
TODO
TODO
TODO
ssh login.toolforge.org
become refill-api
webservice restart
./restart.sh
If that doesn't work, also try...
kubectl delete -f worker-deployment.yml
kubectl apply -f worker-deployment.yml
There are some Docker files in the repo.
TODO
- Documentation for developers:
- Other GitHubs:
- Other Toolforges:
There is documentation for developers scattered in several different places. We are working on consolidating the most important and up-to-date info from these docs into this one README file.