Manual:Short URL

According to World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, good page addresses should never change. Short URLs which hide complex programming code from the page address are good for your audience. Please take a few minutes to devise a stable URL structure for your website before getting started, to reduce problems later.

Introduction

Goal

MediaWiki's default installation path usually looks something like this:

/var/www/localhost/htdocs/mediawiki/w (installed as root user)

/home/johndoe/public_html/mediawiki/w (installed with a shared hosting provider)

MediaWiki's default page addresses looks like these examples:

http://example.org/w/index.php/Page_title (recent versions of MediaWiki, without CGI support)

http://example.org/w/index.php?title=Page_title (recent versions of MediaWiki, with CGI support)

Using the methods outlined on this page, we can configure something like this:

http://example.org/wiki/Page_title This is the most common configuration, same as in Wikipedia, though not the default because it requires server side modifications

http://example.org/view/Page_title

http://wiki.example.org/view/Page_title

http://example.org/Page_title (not recommended!)

http://wiki.example.org/Page_title (not recommended!)

Advantages & disadvantages

URLs without shortening have one minor advantage; they don't require configuration, so no matter in which hosting environment you end up, you can re-create that. However, as every widely used webserver is capable of being configured to use short urls, practically every paid web host should support this feature. Any host that doesn't offer you this feature is not worth your money.

The advantages of short URLs are that they hide all technical details, as is best practice for URLs – among other things this means they can be kept stable when the underlying software changes. They are also easier to read, remember, and manipulate for visitors.

Guides

Our official guides for short URL configuration for different web servers. Pick your webserver's configuration from this list. If you don't know what server software you are using, then it is most likely Apache

• Apache - How to configure short URLs on Apache.
• ...

Other how-to mini-guides

These guides are old and are almost entirely bad advice. These will eventually be deleted one by one as our official guides above are created for different webservers.

Anyone is welcome to create a how-to solution page and list it below. Please use a sensible name for the page, one that fits in with the below names. When each unique solution has its own page, readers can skip complexity they do not want. Keep it simple, readable, short, with a separate page per separate solution.

To help others find out which Short URL methods really work, after trying each method please edit the page and increase the "worked" or "didn't_work" numbers for that guide and make a brief (or long, your choice) description on what went wrong by clicking the link on your number.

URL like - example.com/wiki/Page_title

Root access

These methods require that you have access to the server configuration. If you are on a shared host, you most likely don't. In this case you will be required to use a method that requires "no root access". You can jump directly to the MediaWiki ShortURL Builder tool and follow the on screen instructions after clicking on "I don't have root access".

• wiki/Page title -- Lighttpd rewrite--root access ^x3
• wiki/Page title -- nginx rewrite--root access ^x1
• wiki/Page title -- Cherokee rewrite--root access ^x1
• IIS7
• wiki/Page title -- Windows with IIS7--root access ^{x1 x1}
• wiki/Page title -- Saetta Web Server--root access

(for apache guidance, see the link in the Guides section).

URL like - example.com/Page_title

How to create example.com/Page_title URLs:

• Page title - nginx, Root Access, PHP as a CGI module ^x4
• Page title -- Windows & Apache without 403 on Special Pages ^x1
• Page title -- Saetta Web Server

URL like - wiki.example.com/Page_title

How to create wiki.example.com/Page_title URLs.

• wiki.example.com/Page_title--Subdomain using Lighttpd

Troubleshooting

No Skins

With Ubuntu 8.10 and Mediawiki 1.11.2 (and maybe later versions) if you use the Mediawiki sanctioned directions your skins may fail to load. To fix this, create a symbolic link in /var/www pointing to /var/lib/mediawiki with the value of $wgScriptPath in LocalSettings.php. If, for example, $wgScriptPath is set to "/w" then you need to run the command "sudo ln -s /var/lib/mediawiki /var/www/w".

Alternatively, try setting $wgLoadScript to the original file. If you source url is /wiki with the short url /w, set it to /wiki/load.php.

Purging cache

If you notice that your changes to $wgArticlePath in LocalSettings.php are not being reflected in mysite.com/wiki/Main_Page, it may be due MediaWiki's caching of the links according to previous settings.

Go to mysite.com/wiki/Main_Page?action=purge to force MediaWiki to regenerate the cached links.

Also you can:

1. execute the MySQL query "TRUNCATE objectcache;", or
2. Ensure $wgCacheEpoch is updated (if $wgInvalidateCacheOnLocalSettingsChange is enabled all you have to do is edit LocalSettings.php to purge it)

Redirect visitor of your domain to your wiki

Our official guides for short url configuration include recommendations on how to point the root of your site to your wiki using your short url config.

For example our Apache guide recommends using this to point your site root to your wiki:

RewriteRule ^/*$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/w/index.php [L]

Note that we do not recommend doing a HTTP redirect to your wiki path or main page directly. As redirecting to the main page directly will hard-code variable parts of your wiki's page setup into your server config. And redirecting to the wiki path will result in two redirects.

Moving a wiki from /wiki to /w

A common beginners mistake is to install MediaWiki itself (the source code, not the short url) in /wiki instead of /w. Once installed they would realize the mistake when trying to configure Short URLs (which would become difficult as the virtual path then conflicts with the real path).

There is a manual for moving a wiki in general, however that is too complicated if all you need is to change the installation directory (and stay on the same server, same database and same hostname).

Here is what you have to do:

• Backup LocalSettings.php and any other config files you may have created (such as your .htaccess).
• Rename the installation directory of MediaWiki on your server from /wiki to /w.
• Set $wgScriptPath in LocalSettings.php to "/w" and remove (or comment out) any definition of $wgArticlePath (this variable will be changed again when setting up Short URLs, further on)
• At this point your wiki should be working normally at example.org/w
• Now go through the regular guide to set up short URLs
• Perform a few tests on your wiki to make sure nothing is broken. Edit a page, visit a few different pages, etc. If anything seems abnormal, revert the changes by restoring your backup of LocalSettings.php and other relevant files you might have changed during configuration of short URLs and rename your folder back to /wiki.

Note for shared hosting users: Many shared hosting plans offer an application manager to automatically Install, Update and Backup applications such as MediaWiki. If your plan has this and if you want to keep using these features, you should contact their tech support and let them you just manually changed your MediaWiki installation directory.

Tricks

• IIS6 ^{x1 x1}
• Prevent bots from crawling index.php

See also

• Explanation of what CGI modules are
• $wgUsePathInfo - configuration setting that defines whether to use 'pretty' URLs or not
• Notes on placing your wiki installation in site root directory

External links

• Apache Module mod_rewrite at Apache.org
• MediaWiki Short URL Builder Tool - A tool that can automatically generate short url configuration more reliable than the configurations in these manual pages.