Topic on Extension talk:VisualEditor

I thought I'd put this here, because the instructions were not extremely clear in my case. Though they were thorough enough to troubleshoot.

Install Visual Editor

Note the -b REL1_24

cd extensions
git clone -b REL1_24 https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-VisualEditor.git
cd VisualEditor ***CHANGE THE NAME OF THE FOLDER***
git submodule update —init

Modify LocalSettings.php

require_once "$IP/extensions/VisualEditor/VisualEditor.php";
$wgDefaultUserOptions['visualeditor-enable'] = 1;
$wgHiddenPrefs[] = 'visualeditor-enable';
$wgVisualEditorParsoidURL = 'http://localhost:8142';
$wgVisualEditorParsoidPrefix = 'localhost';

Check that VisualEditor is not throwing the error Fatal exception of type MWException

Install Parsoid

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 5C927F7C
gpg -a --export 5C927F7C | sudo apt-key add -

Open /etc/apt/sources.list and add the follow at the end:

deb [arch=amd64] http://parsoid.wmflabs.org:8080/deb wmf-production main

Run:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install parsoid

Modify /usr/lib/parsoid/src/api/localsettings.js

// parsoidConfig.setInterwiki( 'localhost', 'http://localhost/wiki/api.php', 'http://localhost/' );
parsoidConfig.setInterwiki( 'localhost', 'http://yoursite.com/api.php' );

Modify /etc/mediawiki/parsoid/settings.js

// parsoidConfig.setInterwiki( 'localhost', 'http://localhost/w/api.php' );
parsoidConfig.setInterwiki( 'localhost', 'http://localhost/api.php' );

I can confirm that installing this on Ubuntu 14LTS and MW 1.24 is possible. I also confirm that Apache localhost URLs don't work out of the box and that using the wikis (virtual) hostname is the solution. Finally make sure that the Apache virtual host config file is correct. Since I was moving the wiki to a new machine, I had <VirtualHost wrong.name.here> and that was enough to make the edit button insensitive to any clicking :(

If you like to read longer text, my full installation notes are here