wikitech-static
wikitech-static is an offsite, static, read-only backup of wikitech.wikimedia.org (Wikitech). It is maintained in order to provide emergency documentation in case of a site-wide outage affecting Wikimedia's production network..
If the primary data center (and, hence, Wikitech) is down and you need to search for a troubleshooting guide or look at a wiring diagram, wikitech-static.wikimedia.org will be there for you.
What content is on wikitech-static?
Wikitech-static contains a static, scraped copy of the html served by wikitech.wikimedia.org, along with selected images and pages that are directly linked from wikitech. The scraping progress has not been audited link-by-link, so when in doubt you should directly verify that the versions of critical diagrams have enough detail on wikitech-static.
The web-hosted wikitech static also contains a copy of the production Server Admin Log which is refreshed every five minutes. Note that if you use a local container copy of wikitech-static (see below) it will not contain the latest SAL.
Where is it?
Wikitech-static is hosted on an AWS virtual server hosted in Frankfurt, Germany.
What is wikitech-static running?
Wikitech-static is a simple docker container running nginx and containing static copies of .html and images scraped from the live wikitech wiki.
How do I access/repair/maintain wikitech-static?
The process to access the AWS dashboard is currently in flux; for access use User:Andrewbogott as a remote pair of hands or contact the Infrastructure Foundations team for official access. The VM is held in the AWS organization 'o-t0ntuspdxx' and runs in a datacenter in Frankfurt.
The VM is rebuilt frequently (although not as often as the content is refreshed.) New VMs should always be created with the aws-wikitech-static keypair, and the private key is stored in the SRE pwstore repo. Ssh access looks like ssh -v -i ~/.ssh/aws-wikitech-static.pem admin@ec2-3-126-27-158.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com
Can I download my own copy of wikitech-static?
Recent wikitech-static containers are available on quay.io. You can stand up a local copy by running something like
dockerrun--namewikitechstatic-d-p8080:80quay.io/wikitechstatic/static
Of course your local copy will be a snapshot from the day that you updated your docker image. To be fully up-to-date you will need to automate updates of the image; the specific process for this is left as an exercise for the reader.
Implementation
The docker file and associated code for building a wikitech-static image can be found on gitlab repo sre/wikitech-static-docker. Currently (January 2026) a rebuild job fires every day; the build only barely fits on a gitlab runner, so the build succeeds around half the time.
What alerts should we watch out for?
An alert will fire if the Special:RecentChanges page on wikitech-static falls more than a couple of days behind the Special:RecentChanges page on wikitech.
Services
- morebots
- status.wikimedia.org
- Icinga meta-monitoring