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";
Administration
- Deleting/removing an user is not possible with MediaWiki. You can, however, change the password with the following SQL request:
UPDATE user SET user_password = MD5(CONCAT(user_id, '-',
MD5('somepass'))) WHERE user_name = 'someuser';