How to print the version of a specific MediaWiki installation to terminal

Question

I have a LAMP environment with /var/www/html/x which is a MediaWiki website. I have a few more MediaWiki websites but I'd like to print the version of the x one to terminal.

I need to do so I could know what the last version was before I manually update MediaWiki.

Inside that dir, there's a file named RELEASE-NOTES-1.32 with the text:

== MediaWiki 1.32 ==

=== Changes since MediaWiki 1.32.0-rc.2 ===

MORE_TEXT...........

Maybe I should just print line 3 as with awk 'NR>3' /var/www/html/x/RELEASE-NOTES-* but maybe there's a better way to know the full version of a given MediaWiki installation.

What would be the best, most stable way to do this outputting?

Answer 1

If the wiki is up, the most robust method is to just ask (via the generator property of the siteinfo API, for example) - changes to that are subject to a deprecation policy, while any internal structure you rely on could change without warning.

If that's not an option, you can try parsing out the value of $wgVersion from includes/DefaultSettings.php. E.g.

ack '\$'"wgVersion\s*=\s*'([\w\d.-]+)';" --output='$1' mediawiki/includes/DefaultSettings.php

Checking the release notes works as well, if you always use proper releases, and only care about the major version.