Manual:System administration

This page links instructions for common administrative tasks which you may wish to perform once your installation of MediaWiki is completed.

Configuration

 * See Manual:LocalSettings.php

If you installed MediaWiki through the web interface, then you already ran the initial configuration script that sets common configuration variables.

MediaWiki has several configuration settings. They must be modified in LocalSettings.php. See Manual:Configuration settings for the whole list.

Toggle uploads on and off

 * See Manual:Configuring file uploads

Choosing a design: Selecting a skin

 * See Manual:Skin configuration

The default skin can be adjusted by modifying the $wgDefaultSkin variable in LocalSettings.php. A few other settings can also be adjusted regarding skins.

There are also some custom skins, see Special:AllPages/Skin:.

Other
For a list of configuration settings, see:
 * Manual:Configuration settings
 * Manual:Configuration settings (alphabetical) for an alphabetical list.

To configure specific parts of the software, see:
 * Manual:Short URL for more user-friendly URLs to article pages.

Configuring Apache, PHP and the Database
If you have downloaded binary packages of MySQL (or Postgres), the Apache HTTP Server, and PHP, chances are that they came with an installation script that set them up for your system. To tweak them further, see:


 * Apache configuration
 * Robots.txt
 * PHP configuration
 * Database
 * MySQL
 * PostgreSQL
 * SQLite

Making the wiki fast

 * See Manual:Performance tuning

Setting administrative rights
MediaWiki is a permissions-based wiki system. That means that users will only be able to perform the actions they are allowed to do. As declaring permissions individually for every user would be tedious and impractical, several User rights are pre-defined in MediaWiki. You are also allowed to declare new user groups, as your needs require. Individual extensions may also require creating new user rights.

Regardless of how they are created, user groups are fully customizable, by modifying the $wgGroupPermissions associative array in your LocalSettings.php file.


 * Manual:User rights
 * Manual:Preventing access
 * Manual:Security

Sysop (Administrator)
The most common use. A user marked as 'sysop' can delete and undelete pages, block and unblock IPs and use a shortcut revert-to-previous-contributor's-revision feature in contribs, see Manual:Administrators for more information.

Bureaucrat
Users in this group can change user rights through Special:UserRights.

Bot
A registered bot account. Edits by an account with this set will not appear by default in Recent changes; this is intended for mass imports of data without flooding human edits from view. (Add &hidebots=0 to list changes made by bots e.g. like this)

Installing extensions

 * See Manual:Extensions

Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core.

Localization

 * See Manual:System message

If you simply want to change the language of a wiki on a per-user basis, this can be done via Special:Preferences. If you selected the wrong language when setting up the wiki simply change the $wgLanguageCode in LocalSettings.php.

Maintenance scripts

 * See  Manual:Maintenance scripts

MediaWiki has some maintenance script to help doing administrative tasks.

Upgrading MediaWiki

 * See Manual:Upgrading

Back up

 * See Manual:Backing up a wiki

It is important to make regular backups of the data in your wiki. This includes the database, uploaded files and extensions.

Importing a database dump

 * See Manual:Importing XML dumps

If you want a local copy of a Wikimedia wiki, see the overview at meta:Data dumps and the download site.

Converting (importing) existing content

 * See Manual:Importing external content

Some scripts exist to import data from other wiki engines.

On-wiki customisations

 * See Manual:Page customizations

Much of the appearance and messaging of MediaWiki is determined by messages that administrators can edit like regular wiki pages.
 * For a brief overview that addresses the empty help pages, see Project:PD help/Copying.

Changing the sidebar

 * See Manual:Sidebar

Changing the tagline

 * See Manual:Tagline (Site Subtitle)