Toolforge interface / API for testing out how differential privacy might be applied to Wikimedia data.

To run this program locally, you need to have golang, mysql, and all requisite packages installed. You will also need a file called replica.my.cnf containing the following fields:

user = your mysql username

password = your mysql password

Then, navigate to the base directory (cd /path/to/wiki-diff-privacy) and:

1. go run init_db.go — initializes synthetic data db (privacy unit is either a pageview) and output db
2. go run beam.go — does normal and differentially private counts of the existing dbs. Warning: this is an expensive computation — on a newish macbook, a language with around 500,000 views takes >90 seconds to count. To do all of the languages I've laid out here, it usually takes between 15-20 minutes.
3. go run clean_db.go — removes old dbs and synthetic data, which can take up a lot of space
4. go run server.go — runs the server. Should be accessible at 127.0.0.1:8000 in a browser.

On your local machine, wherever you keep your code:

git clone https://github.com/htried/wiki-diff-privacy.git
scp wiki-diff-privacy/config/*.sh <username>@diff-privacy-beam-test.wmf-research-tools.eqiad1.wikimedia.cloud:/home/<username>/

# these two are secret files, contact htriedman-ctr@wikimedia.org to access them
scp wiki-diff-privacy/config/replica.my.cnf <username>@diff-privacy-beam-test.wmf-research-tools.eqiad1.wikimedia.cloud:/home/<username>/
scp wiki-diff-privacy/config/config.sql <username>@diff-privacy-beam-test.wmf-research-tools.eqiad1.wikimedia.cloud:/home/<username>/

Now ssh into your Cloud VPS machine:

ssh <username>@diff-privacy-beam-test.wmf-research-tools.eqiad1.wikimedia.cloud
sudo bash cloudvps_setup.sh
sudo bash update_data.sh

At this point, the website should be working fine. You can check that by navigating to diff-privacy-beam.wmcloud.org on your browser.

Finally, set up a cron job to update the data every day at UTC+0900

sudo crontab -e
add a line reading “0 9 * * * /home/<username>/update_data.sh” to the end of the crontab

If you make changes to the codebase on your local machine, you can see those changes reflected in production by ssh-ing into your Cloud VPS machine and running sudo bash release.sh, which will pull from github and restart the nginx server with the relevant changes.

The source code for this interface is released under the MIT license.

Screenshots of the results in the API may be used without attribution, but a link back to the application would be appreciated.