Ideally we'd avoid hardcoding Commons entirely and instead of exporting isInstantCommons, we'd export fileRepos. That should be almost as easy to do and would fix other things as well:

• Wikis where their repo is Commons but through their own wgForeignFileRepos setting (e.g. like on WMF where we use more fine-tuned configuration that does essentially the same, or wikis that configure it but don't use wgUseInstantCommons because they want to set different parameters (e.g. disable repo[fetchDescription] or use a non-default repo[cacheExpiry]).

• Wikis with more than 2 repositories.

• Wikis working with other repos (e.g. a wiki farm might have their own commons-like thing).

Especially reason #1 since we do use InstantCommons in production but not the default settings through the UseInstantCommons toggle. We could hardcode some detection and export "isUsingCommonsAsARepoSomehow", but might as well take a few more minutes and figure out how to just export an array of api urls.

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgUseInstantCommons#Details

(In reply to comment #1)

Ideally we'd avoid hardcoding Commons entirely and instead of exporting
isInstantCommons, we'd export fileRepos.

Indeed; that was what I was thinking when I wrote this bug. Title modified to be clearer.

humpface wrote:

This was very frustrating for my work's internal wiki. First, I didn't want any Instant Common images (and thanks to James, I was able to remove the line of code). However, since I disabled the use of Instant Commons ($wgUseInstantCommons = false;), I was still able to search through the Instant Commons but after saving, everything showed up as a broken link.

Suggestion:

• Tie the JSON mediaSources object in ve.init.ms.Platform.js to the $wgUseInstantCommons (i.e., if Commons is turned off in LocalSettings.php, then a user can't search through the images).

This can now be done by using the new meta=filerepoinfo API query, which was introduced into core in gerrit 85344.

Change 102377 had a related patch set uploaded by Mooeypoo:
Use image sources from API's fileRepo

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/102377

Change 102377 merged by jenkins-bot:
Use image sources from the fileRepo API

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/102377