How To Install WikkaWiki on Ubuntu 16.04

WikkaWiki (aka Wikka) is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Forked from WakkaWiki. Designed for speed, extensibility, and security. Released under the GPL license.

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 WikkaWiki on a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) server.

Install WikkaWiki 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 php5 php5-mysql php5-gd libapache2-mod-php5 php5-curl libssh2-php

Step 3. Installing WikkaWiki.

First thing to do is to go to WikkaWiki’s download page and download the latest stable version of WikkaWiki, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.3.7:

wget http://wikkawiki.org/downloads/Wikka-1.3.7.zip
unzip Wikka-1.3.7.zip
mv WikkaWiki-1.3.7/ /var/www/html/wikkawiki

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/wikkawiki/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for WikkaWiki.

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 WikkaWiki. 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 WikkaWiki installation:

CREATE DATABASE wikkawiki;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wikkawiki.* TO 'wikkauser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
\q

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for WikkaWiki.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘wikkawiki.conf’ on your virtual server:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/wikkawiki.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/wikkawiki.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/wikkawiki.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/wikkawiki.conf

Add the following lines:

ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/wikkawiki/
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 WikkaWiki.

WikkaWiki 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.

Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed WikkaWiki. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing WikkaWiki on Ubuntu 16.04 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official WikkaWiki web site.

Leave a Reply