Manual:Installation

This guide provides detailed instructions on installing MediaWiki. For a quick overview, please see Manual:Installation guide. For guidance on specific operating systems, see the menu to the right.

MediaWiki can be difficult to install for the average computer user who does not have experience with Apache, PHP and MySql. Most users who wish to use wiki software may benefit from using a free wiki host (see a list of wiki hosts on Wikibooks).

Uninstallation
Removing MediaWiki entirely can be accomplished in two steps: removing the directory where MediaWiki was installed, and dropping the MediaWiki database from MySQL or Postgres.

For example, if you installed MediaWiki to /var/www/mediawiki-xyz, you might do

rm -rf /var/www/mediawiki-xyz

MySQL
To remove the MySQL database holding your wiki, use the mysql utility to interactively connect to MySQL as a user with adequate permissions, then issue the following command at the mysql> prompt:

DROP DATABASE wikidb;

Postgres
To remove the Postgres database holding your wiki, run the following command:

dropdb wikidb

or connect to the database as a user with the correct permissions and issue:

DROP DATABASE wikidb;