Manual:Installation requirements

In addition to the software itself, a standard MediaWiki installation has the following requirements: In addition, there are various optional dependencies which are required if you want to use certain advanced features (see below).
 * A web server is required to serve the requested pages to the client browser.
 * PHP is required to run the software.
 * A database server is required to store the pages and site data.

If your website is hosted (i.e. you don't have direct control over it) then contact your server administrator or hosting company to ensure these software packages are installed and available.

= == Simple one-download installation == =

Use XAMPP from http://www.apachefriends.org to install and configure all of the important packages – Apache web server, PHP, and MySQL database – with only one download. It is available for Linux, Windows, Mac and Solaris. the latest version of XAMPP includes PHP 5.6.12 (MediaWiki requires at least ).

= == Web server == =

In order to serve wiki pages to browsers, MediaWiki requires some web server software. Often you will not have a choice of which software to use – it will be the one provided by your hosting provider.

Most installations use the Apache web server, available at the official download page. However, MediaWiki has also been tested under IIS 7.0, Cherokee, Hiawatha, LiteSpeed, nginx (configuration example), and lighttpd.

= == PHP == =

PHP is the programming language in which MediaWiki is written, and is required in order to run the software.

Note that although MediaWiki ships with an installation script which provides web-based configuration of the most important elements, some knowledge of PHP is required for more detailed customizations.


 * For the latest stable version of MediaWiki, PHP version or later is required.
 * If you are unable to upgrade to PHP, then you can use MediaWiki 1.19.24 (no longer supported), which requires PHP version 5.2.3 or later
 * The following extensions are required:
 * Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) (v4.0+, MediaWiki 1.23 requires PCRE 7.2+ which may not be available in earlier PHP packages)


 * Session


 * Standard PHP Library


 * JSON (since 1.22).

In most Debian/Ubuntu-based distros, this is in the php5-intl package.
 * Note that all of these are enabled in PHP by default.
 * MediaWiki's installer will warn if you don't have the optional PHP intl extension "to handle Unicode normalization".
 * On most Debian/Ubuntu-based distros, either the php5-mysql or php5-mysqlnd package is required if you want MediaWiki to use MySQL.
 * If you are installing MediaWiki on CentOS 5.6, use the php53 package instead of php. The php package contains PHP 5.1.x, which is not compatible with the latest version of MediaWiki.
 * If you are installing MediaWiki on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 (CentOS 6.4), you will need to install the php-xml package in addition to the normal php package.
 * Some features of MediaWiki may require PHP functions that execute external processes, like image thumbnailing, that some cheap hosts usually disable. This has surfaced specially in MediaWiki 1.23 on file uploads .  Please take this into consideration if you plan to install MediaWiki on a shared host.
 * MediaWiki extensions may require additional PHP features, e.g. VisualEditor requires libcurl support (php5-curl on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros).

If you need to compile PHP from source, then see PHP configuration for compilation options that affect MediaWiki.

Notes:
 * Some servers may also require the equivalent database module and session management module be installed. See individual operating system instructions for more information.
 * When installing on Windows using the Microsoft installer, add the extension for your database of choice (MySQL or Postgres) to the features to be installed.

= == Database server == =

MediaWiki stores all the text and data (content pages, user details, system messages, etc.) in a database, which it is capable of sharing with other web-based applications (phpBB, etc.). You will need one of the following database servers to run the latest version of MediaWiki:


 * MySQL or later* or MariaDB 5.1+
 * PostgreSQL or later (supported since MediaWiki 1.8). See Manual:Installing MediaWiki for more detail.
 * SQLite 3
 * Oracle (Oracle is currently unsupported on the latest MediaWiki versions due to open blocking bugs)

Some users find it helpful to install an additional software package such as phpMyAdmin (MySQL) or phpPgAdmin (Postgres) to help administer the database server.

= == Hardware requirements == =

The recommended minimum requirements are 256MB of RAM for a single-computer website and 85MB of storage, although this will not suffice for a busy public site or a site with uploading enabled. Some users have reported running MediaWiki on computers with as little as 48MB of RAM.

The install size can be reduced to around 50Mb for a developer install and to around 26Mb for a non-developer, end-user install. See Manual:Reduce size of the installation

= == Optional dependencies == =

Other software

 * ImageMagick or GD is required for image thumbnailing.
 * TeX is required for inline display of mathematical formulae. In most Debian/Ubuntu-based distros, this is in the texlive package.
 * Sendmail is required in order for the system to be able to send e-mails.
 * Shell access is required to run maintenance scripts; upgrading MediaWiki may be more difficult without it.

For further information about the above items, see Manual:Installing third-party tools.

VisualEditor
The VisualEditor extension (and also the Flow extension) requires the Parsoid web service, which is implemented using Node.js. Node.js is not provided by most shared-hosting companies (HostGator, Bluehost, Dreamhost, etc.). For performance and security reasons, it is better to use a dedicated hosting solution such as a Virtual private server ("VPS").

Scribunto
If you want to invoke Lua modules (see those on this wiki) from wiki pages and templates, your wiki will also require Scribunto.