Manual:Running MediaWiki on macOS

The primary development and deployment environment for MediaWiki is on Linux and Unix systems; Mac OS X is Unix under the hood, so it's fairly straightforward to run it.

Get requirements
Instead of setting the required software up separately you might be better off to start with MAMPstack + MediaWiki, which gives you Apache, MySQL, PHP & MediaWiki in one convenient package.

Or use XAMPP Application to get easier Installation and highly recommended for beginners, go here instead.

MAMP
For a personal Wiki environment, you may find it easier to install MAMP, if you are using Mac OS X 10.4 or newer (MAMP will not run on Mac OS X 10.3 or older). This installer will provide its own Apache, MySQL and PHP (with eAccelerator (an updated MMCache) and Zend Optimizer) and a nice simple control panel, running under your login (in other words, this really isn't configured to work as a production server, so don't do that). If you turn off the Mac's built-in personal web server, you can run MAMP's Apache on port 80.

You will still need to install ImageMagick, but otherwise everything MediaWiki needs will be there. Note that with MAMP your personal Web directory defaults to /Applications/MAMP/htdocs instead of the Mac's usual /Users/yourname/Sites. If you don't want to store your own data files in the Applications directory, open MAMP's Preferences, select the Apache tab, and change the document root to the directory of your choice. /Users/yourname/Sites is an excellent choice. Clicking on MAMP's Open Start page button will open http://localhost:8888/MAMP/ in your browser to show you how things are configured.

TeX support
See Manual talk:Running MediaWiki on Mac OS X for explicit instructions on how to add TeX support for macOS.

Prerequisites

 * Homebrew installed
 * Gerrit account set up
 * If MediaWiki was previously set up with Docker:
 * Create a new directory to clone MediaWiki into (allowing for parallel setups so that each can have its own )
 * Stop the container (both this and Docker setups run on 8080 port so there could only be one running at any given time)

Steps

 * 1) Create empty   directory, download MediaWiki from Git into   folder inside mediawiki folder
 * 2) Install Composer 1.x (use wget rather than brew for this since the latter installs 2.x and MediaWiki only works with 1.x). After this step,   should be accessible.
 * 3) Update MediaWiki dependencies
 * 4) Set up PHP, Apache, MariaDB, Redis, ElasticSearch (Docker) locally and update Apache config per https://www.kostaharlan.net/posts/mediawiki-homebrew-php/
 * 5) Start services
 * 6) Make sure all services are running (by running   and   for ElasticSearch) & navigate to
 * 7) Go through MediaWiki installation steps (installation link is at the bottom of the page), at the end of the process, save   to the project directory
 * 8) After these steps, there should be a barebone MediaWiki installation (no skins/styling/data) at.

ElasticSearch
ElasticSearch is also installable via homebrew, but it won't have the  or   plugins. Running ElasticSearch as a Docker container is a good option: If you are on an Apple M1 system, you will want to use the  image that is built for arm64. See more setup instruction in MediaWiki-Docker/Configuration recipes/ElasticSearch (although you can ignore the Docker-Compose snippet there)

Setting up XDebug with PhpStorm

 * 1) Install Xdebug via
 * 2) Add   and   to   (check the config file path by running  )
 * 3) Verify Xdebug shows up when running
 * 4) Restart Apache & PHP
 * 5) In PhpStorm: Preferences > Languages & Frameworks > PHP > CLI interpreter > PHP executable > Select Homebrew PHP path (for example  ), make sure debug port includes
 * 6) Install Xdebug browser extension
 * 7) In PhpStorm: Listen for PHP Debug Connections (phone icon on top right)
 * 8) Verify setup in PhpStorm: PhpStorm > Run > Web Server Debug Validation > Enter   for “Url to validation script”