Installation

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Pywikibot

The Pywikibot framework is a Python library that interfaces with the MediaWiki API version 1.23 or higher.

Also included are various general function scripts that can be adapted for different tasks.

For further information about the library excluding scripts see the full code documentation.

Quick start

pip install requests
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/pywikibot/core.git
cd core
git submodule update --init
python pwb.py script_name

Or to install using PyPI (excluding scripts)

pip install -U setuptools
pip install pywikibot

In addition a MediaWiki markup parser is required. Please install one of them:

pip install mwparserfromhell

or

pip install wikitextparser

Our installation guide has more details for advanced usage.

Basic Usage

If you wish to write your own script it’s very easy to get started:

import pywikibot
site = pywikibot.Site('en', 'wikipedia')  # The site we want to run our bot on
page = pywikibot.Page(site, 'Wikipedia:Sandbox')
page.text = page.text.replace('foo', 'bar')
page.save('Replacing "foo" with "bar"')  # Saves the page

Wikibase Usage

Wikibase is a flexible knowledge base software that drives Wikidata. A sample pywikibot script for getting data from Wikibase:

import pywikibot
site = pywikibot.Site('wikipedia:en')
repo = site.data_repository()  # the Wikibase repository for given site
page = repo.page_from_repository('Q91')  # create a local page for the given item
item = pywikibot.ItemPage(repo, 'Q91')  # a repository item
data = item.get()  # get all item data from repository for this item

Script example

Pywikibot provides bot classes to develop your own script easily:

import pywikibot
from pywikibot import pagegenerators
from pywikibot.bot import ExistingPageBot

class MyBot(ExistingPageBot):

    update_options = {
        'text': 'This is a test text',
        'summary: 'Bot: a bot test edit with Pywikbot.'
    }

    def treat_page(self):
        """Load the given page, do some changes, and save it."""
        text = self.current_page.text
        text += '\n' + self.opt.text
        self.put_current(text, summary=self.opt.summary)

def main():
    """Parse command line arguments and invoke bot."""
    options = {}
    gen_factory = pagegenerators.GeneratorFactory()
    # Option parsing
    local_args = pywikibot.handle_args(args)  # global options
    local_args = gen_factory.handle_args(local_args)  # generators options
    for arg in local_args:
        opt, sep, value = arg.partition(':')
        if opt in ('-summary', '-text'):
            options[opt[1:]] = value
    MyBot(generator=gen_factory.getCombinedGenerator(), **options).run()

if __name == '__main__':
    main()

Settings

It is recommended to create a user-config.py file if Pywikibot is used as a site package. If Pywikibot is used in directory mode e.g. from a repository the configuration file is mandatory. A minimal sample is shown below.

# This is a sample file. You should use generate_user_files.py
# to create your user-config.py file.

mylang = 'en'
family = 'wikipedia'
usernames['wikipedia']['en'] = 'Test'

This sample is shipped with the repository but is not available with the site-package. For more settings use generate_user_files script (not available with site-package) or refer pywikibot.config.

Note

Please also see the documentation at Installation