Installing MediaWiki Guide

MediaWiki, the Wiki engine powering this site, is fully open-source and free. It seems to be robust, and reasonably fast. Configuring and installing it, however, is not so easy. This guide is a tutorial for MediaWiki administrators.

Prerequisites

• Apache
• PHP
• MySQL

Optional Software

• APC. This is a PHP accelerator.
• memcached. This a daemon caching SQL requests in memory. If you run two Wikis on the same machine, beware that it can cause serious problems. If there is a single memcached daemon running, and both Wikis use it, they will interfere and one Wiki will end up serving the contents of the other. A solution can be to run memcached on several machines, or maybe on the same machine but with different ports. However, this last option on Mac OS X seems to be tricky.

Installation

Installation is easy, just download MediaWiki from Sourceforge and uncompress the tarball in a directory that Apache can serve. Then follow the instructions on the README to perform the initial configuration. It involves running a PHP script that will configure the Wiki for you.

Warning: the initial administrator account is named "WikiSysop", and is case sensitive. If you forget it, search it on the MySQL database directly.

Configuration

• Using memcached

• Obtaining nice URLs: A guide to remove "index.php" from the URL is available online. However I don't find it very clear. The important steps are:
  • Unpack the MediaWiki in a directory NOT named "wiki", for example "wikistuff" will do.
  • In LocalSettings.php, set $wgScriptPath = "/wikistuff"; and $wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";
  • Write an Alias rule for Apache: add the line

Alias /wiki /filesystem/path/to/wikistuff/index.php

in the Apache configuration file. Note: don't add the second line as mentionned in the guide!

• Disabling automatic account creation and anonymous edits. Add the following lines to LocalSettings.php:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

• Customizing logo (note that it should start with the name of the wiki directory, eg /wiki here):

$wgLogo = "/wiki/path/to/logo.png";

Usage

• Editing Guide, very helpful