ExternBib

Mediawiki extension to convert BibTeX files to SQLite databases and search engine queries to SQL queries.

Requirements

• PHP >= 7.0.0
• Mediawiki >= 1.23

Usage

Command-line interface

To populate a SQLite database with a collection of BibTeX files:

php updatedb.php -o bibliography.db file1.bib file2.bib

To read specific entries from a SQLite database:

php dumpdb.php bibliography.db einstein1905 einstein1906

To run the testsuite:

php test/test_tex2html.php
php test/test_db.php

Continuous delivery

If the BibTeX files are version-controlled in a git repository, database generation can be automatized with a post-receive hook, such as:

#!/bin/bash

read commit_old commit_new branch_name

if [ "${branch_name}" != "refs/heads/main" ]; then
    echo "Only changes committed to the main branch are copied to the wiki!" >&2
    echo "You have sent changes for ${branch_name}." >&2
    echo "Skipping." >&2
    exit 0
fi

echo "Copying changes to the wiki... Please wait." >&2

result=$(curl -Ls --data old=${commit_old} --data new=${commit_new} \
                  --data branch=${branch_name} --data repo=$(realpath "${PWD}") \
                  https://www2.icp.uni-stuttgart.de/gitlab-hooks/copy-bibtex.php)
if [ "${result}" != "Success" ]; then
    echo "An error occured while copying to the wiki:" >&2
    echo ${result} >&2
    exit 1
fi

echo "Successfully copied changes to the wiki." >&2
exit 0

Mediawiki integration

To set up the BibTeX search engine in the wiki, copy the contents of the project to /path/to/mediawiki/extensions/ExternBib and copy the database file(s) to /path/to/mediawiki/extensions/ExternBib/work.

New HTML tags

To show citations, use <bibentry>einstein1905a, einstein1905b</bibentry>. The comma is optional and can be replaced with a whitespace or newline character. To show search results, use <bibsearch>author=einstein</bibsearch>.

The following properties are supported:

• abstract="true": show abstract
• bibtex="true": show raw BibTeX
• compact="true": don't insert line breaks between paragraphs
• meta="true": add BibTeX timestamp, owner and citation key
• filelink="true": add links to files
• fullentrylink="true": add link to full entry

New special pages

All records in the database(s) can be dynamically accessed via special subpages. For example, to display einstein1905a, open subpage Special:ExternBibShowEntry/einstein1905a.

The database(s) can be queries in the special page Special:ExternBibSearch. There is a radio button to select the database to query. The query takes the form author=einstein and title="Wärme" and year<1906 where "=" is handled as "contains". The search is case-insensitive and diacritics-insensitive. Only the "and" logical operator is implemented.

License

[BSD 3-clause "Modified" License](https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause New BSD License) (C) The Authors, unless stated otherwise.