Welcome to Parsoid! Parsoid is meant to be a simple, featureful parser for wikitext that produces HTML DOMs which can then be turned back into wikitext, even after modifications.

Prerequisites

You'll need:

git
node.js
npm (Node.js Package Manager)

A note about node.js

In a lot of places, you will see this document refer to a node executable. On newer Debian systems, and maybe in other places, however, node.js is run by a command nodejs. You should experiment with both and be conscious of which one you need to use as you read this guide.

Getting the code

To get the code, you'll need to clone our git repository. Run this command:

$ git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/p/mediawiki/services/parsoid

Installing node.js dependencies

Now that you have the code, you can run npm to get all of the necessary dependencies. From the main directory of the Parsoid repository, run:

$ npm install

Running the API

The API is the main reason you might want to run Parsoid, because VisualEditor uses it to do a lot of backend work. To run the API in a terminal, from the base directory in the Parsoid repository run the following:

$ node bin/server

Note that if you want to enable any options, or change any settings, you will need to copy the example config.example.yaml file and use it to define any of your desired options.

Running the basic parse tool

If you aren't looking to run an API service, or VisualEditor, or if you just want to test Parsoid's capabilities, you can use our simple parse.js script. Again, from the base directory in the Parsoid repository, run something like:

$ echo "some harmless [[wikitext]]" | node tests/parse

This will run the echoed text through the wikitext parser and show you the resulting HTML. You can also specify different options for different output - --wt2wt will convert wikitext to HTML and then back to wikitext, --html2wt will convert HTML to wikitext, and --html2html will convert HTML to wikitext and then back to HTML. By default the HTML output will contain a lot of internal Parsoid data (data-parsoid attributes, for example). You may wish to use the command-line option --normalize=parsoid to clean things up a bit and make it easier to tell what's going on.

You can test the parser this way — please use this tool when trying to report bugs.

More setup and usage examples

If you want more, you might want to try our developer setup guide if you want to see how you can run Parsoid's test suites, use the debug and trace flags, and perform round-trip testing on real wiki articles.