MediaWiki is a free and open source wiki software, used to power wiki websites such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Commons, developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and others. It is written in the PHP programming language and uses a backend database.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation MediaWiki on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 16.04
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also install all required PHP modules:
apt-get install imagemagick php7.0-intl php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql
Step 3. Installing MediaWiki.
First thing to do is to go to MediaWiki’s download page and download the latest stable version of MediaWiki, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.8.7:
wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.27/mediawiki-1.27.1.tar.gz
Unpack the MediaWiki archive to the document root directory on your server:
tar -xvzf mediawiki-1.27.1.tar.gz mv /opt/mediawiki-1.27.1/ /var/www/html/mediawiki
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/html/mediawiki
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for MediaWiki.
By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. You should read and below each steps carefully which will set root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB.
mysql_secure_installation
Configure it like this:
- Set root password? [Y/n] y - Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y - Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y - Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y - Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
Next we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the MediaWiki. Run the following command:
mysql -u root -p
This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for MediaWiki installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE wikidb; MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'wikiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'y0uR-passW0rd'; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wikidb.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> \q
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for MediaWiki.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘mediawiki.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite rm /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mediawiki.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf
Add the following lines:
ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mediawiki/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
Now, we can restart Apache web server so that the changes take place:
systemctl restart apache2.service
Step 6. Accessing MediaWiki.
MediaWiki will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com or http://server-ip and complete the required the steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.
At the end of the installation, you will need to upload the file to /var/www/html. You can do that via FTP, but to speed up the process, just open the downloaded file with a text editor, copy all the content from it and paste it to a new LocalSettings.php file
that you can create using the following command:
nano /var/www/html/LocalSettings.php
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed MediaWiki. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing MediaWiki in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official MediaWiki web site.