Thread:Project:Support desk/index only view-able from localhost/reply (6)

I think what I learned from this is that if you're developing on localhost, but want to be accessible over WINS or IP, don't use localhost/... use what you want to be visible as. Does that sound accurate to any of you veterans? It appears to me that localsettings.php gets populated as you use the wiki, is this true? Because $wgServer and those variables weren't present in my "as-downloaded" localsettings.php

The installer is the only thing that writes to LocalSettings.php. If $wgServer is not present in LocalSettings.php we guess what the correct value should be on every request (So if you access the site as localhost, it magically becomes localhost just for that request, and if you access via IP later, it becomes that IP, and so on). By and large everything should just work in regards to $wgServer if it is not present, even if you access the site via different host names. (In fact not putting it in LocalSettings.php was the default up until recently. I'm not sure why we changed doing that).

With that said, if you always access it by the hostname you want (in particular, you especially do that while running the installer), there is no possibility of MediaWiki getting confused at any point.