Manual:LocalSettings.php

The   file provides basic configuration settings (based on the  file) of a MediaWiki installation. You should take your time to review the settings in this file. The file is usually generated by the web-based MediaWiki installer but you can tweak the parameters, possibly in concert with Apache settings. For MediaWiki installations configured as a wiki farm, a file named may be used.

Location on the server
The file is not a wiki page, and you cannot access it with your web browser.

Instead, it is a file in the file system of the server. Its contents are generated during the initial setup of the wiki, and the resulting file must be copied to the server manually. The file must be located in the folder you installed MediaWiki into, on the same level with folders like and  and files like. If this file is not there, the wiki will not work at all—if the wiki does work, the file is there. If you do not know where it is, you can enter a command such as find / -iname LocalSettings.php -print in a terminal window to locate it.

(If you are using Vagrant, see also MediaWiki-Vagrant#MediaWiki_settings.)

Security
usually contains sensitive data such as database logins. This data should never be revealed to the public! Due to a security breach somewhere on the server, it might happen that other users are able to view the contents of files. In order to improve security of your data, you should set UNIX permissions for this file accordingly: The webserver user must have access to this file. If this is the same account, who is the owner of the file, then you can set permissions to 600. Sometimes, the webserver user is not the file owner, but they are in the owner's UNIX user group. In this case, permissions of 640 should be fine. For improved security you should narrow permissions down as far as possible.

Additionally, you can create a MySQL user, who is restricted to only the database used by the wiki and provide this user's credentials in. Also you can configure your database server to only accept connections from localhost - this should prevent access from outside in case of leaked credentials.

See also for a method to move the sensitive parts of  to a different file in a different directory.

File contents
When you edit, make sure to save it in the right encoding again. You should use "ANSI as UTF-8" encoding - that is UTF-8 encoding without byte order mark (BOM).

contains PHP code; mainly the definition of variables and their values. Changing a setting usually means changing the value of a PHP variable. Your changes will take effect immediately after saving the file again on the server: There is no need to manually "restart" anything. Anyway, in some cases you may need to clear your browser's cache to actually see the changes you made.

The default values of many more settings are set in, which should not be edited; if the variable you want to change is not already mentioned in your  , copy the appropriate line from   and modify it appropriately in. Within  you can add new lines at the end.

Within the file, there can also be several lines such as ' ', which point to extensions. These lines enable the according extension in the wiki. Those extensions may require setting the values of more variables in ; check the documentation of the according extension for further instructions.

Like most PHP files in MediaWiki,  does not end with the closing PHP tag. This prevents admins from accidentally adding new information after this tag. PHP works fine without a closing tag.

If you have a wiki on a MediaWiki wiki farm you may not have write-access (perhaps not even read-access) to the file  (see e.g.  ). The wiki farm company may or may not be willing to make changes you desire. Perhaps it wants to keep most settings the same on all wikis of the wiki farm.

Overview of available settings
See the configuration settings index and the comments included in the settings files for help on what all the variables do. A short listing of the most important variables, as well as the most requested features, is listed below.

Install path
The  (install path) variable holds the local file path to the base installation of your wiki. Since MediaWiki 1.18, the system sets $IP automatically. Setting manually in  is no longer needed. will default to the current working directory and can be used without the need to manually define it. Attempting to set (or  ) in   may produce unexpected results.

The file gets loaded from the directory designated by the IP variable.

Site name
 holds the name of your wiki setup. This name gets included many times throughout the system, such as via MediaWiki:Pagetitle. For instance, the Wikipedia tagline "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" makes use of this setting.

Declensions of site name
Some translations of interface are ready for inflection of site name. You can set proper forms of word in variables ' (for example please refer to the ' documentation page).

Site language
 controls the language of your wiki's interface. While users can switch the language they see in their preferences, this variable sets the default language that all anonymous users and most registered users see.

Script path
 is the URL path prefix to access the main MediaWiki script that is the central acting piece of code of MediaWiki. This setting should correspond to the Apache settings, especially if you are using Apache's rewrite rules.

Server name
 contains the base URL of the server, including protocol but without the trailing slash and without the subdirectory if any. When the wiki is accessed from either the localhost where it runs, from an intranet or from the internet, email notifications and a few other computed messages would be usually delivered with the different URLs.

From MediaWiki 1.34 must be set in LocalSettings.php. Prior to that, MediaWiki tried to autodetect the name of the server and was optional, to override the autodetection.

If www.example.com is the server address of your wiki as seen from the internet, add a line such as

The magic word variable can be used on wiki pages; it equals the value of  ; however, on a wiki, such as those in the Wikimedia family, where relative urls are used, it will not fully expand, for example here it displays , which can neither be clicked nor copy-pasted into the address bar as it is.

You can also use a protocol relative URL as shown below. When using a protocol relative URL, be sure to set. is needed for some places in the code where an origin with a protocol and hostname is needed.

Script name
 is the name of the main (index) MediaWiki PHP script, named  by default. Changing the script name is probably not a good idea. However, if you feel the urge to do so, this is the place to make your changes. Make sure you know what you are doing.

Article path
 is the path to use when accessing a page in MediaWiki. The path should contain the path to the main script (usually making use of ) and use the  placeholder for the article name.

If you are using Apache rewrite rules to create pretty and short URLs, you probably need to adjust to address the right path. Note that wgArticlePath is used to construct URLs from within MediaWiki. If you make a mistake here, internal links will show up incorrectly while you still may be able to access the main page by specifying the correct URL manually. See for more information on URL configuration.

Typical values are:

Stylesheet location
Use  to set the URL path to the place where the stylesheets (CSS) for the MediaWiki installation are located.  should point the same place, but note that this is a local file system path for use in internal scripts accessing the file system.

Upload location
The upload directory is the place where files uploaded by the users are stored. ' specifies the URL path, ' points to the local file system path.

Logo
 specifies which graphical logo is displayed in the top left corner of all MediaWiki pages. These steps replace the default logo in the /wiki/skins/common/images/ directory, replacing /wiki with the path to the directory where you installed the MediaWiki software.

First, copy whatever logo you want into the /wiki/skins/common/images/ directory (replacing /wiki with the path to the directory where you installed the MediaWiki software).

Next, try to find the line that looks like this in :

If there's no such line, you can copy and paste the line above at the end of the file.

Then, modify that line to point to your logo. The logo must be web accessible. The value of this variable is passed to the web browser, which uses it to fetch the logo. If in doubt, a good way to pick what to put here is navigate to the logo in your web browser (for example, this wiki the url of the logo is http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/b/bc/Wiki.png ), and put the full URL as the value of this variable.

Some people just replace the skins/common/images/wiki.png file with their logo. This is not recommended, as the customized logo would be overwritten on upgrade.

MediaWiki 1.35 introduced, which allows multiple versions of the same logo. An example of using multiple logos is shown below.

Contact info
 is the email address of the user to contact if something goes wrong. This email address is used to send internal bug reports to. As an administrator, you want to include your email address here.

 is the email address where email gets sent from, when passwords are sent out to users who have forgotten their passwords. Choose an address people can reply to in case of trouble or confusion.

Database settings
MediaWiki needs access to the database (currently either MySQL or PostgreSQL) to store pages, modifications, user information, and a lot more things.

 contains the hostname where the database is hosted on. In most cases this will be just "localhost" as the database is run on the same system, but for distributed installations, you need to fill in the fully qualified domain name of the computer running the database.

 is the database name of the database to be used by MediaWiki. A single MySQL or PostgreSQL installation can store more than one database and you can even run many MediaWiki installations on a single server. Make sure you have stated the correct database name here and use different database names for different wiki installations on the same database server.

' and ' contain the login name and password to be used by MediaWiki to access the database. Make sure the specified user has the proper access rights to be able to manipulate the wiki's table on the database server.

Also see for a method to move the sensitive parts of   to a different file in a different directory.

User rights
 is an associative array, controlling permissions for creating and editing pages for your different user groups. In this array, custom permission levels can be created, and permission levels for the different user groups can be set. See for more information about the different permissions and user groups available.

Force capital links
By default, no page name can start with a lowercase Roman letter: in an attempt to do so the first letter is converted to uppercase; if a link target, included page, image or category is specified with a name starting with a lowercase letter, the actual target etc. is the page starting with the corresponding capital.

Alternatively page names can start with a lowercase letter, in addition to the possibilities of starting with a capital, a digit, etc. For that you must adjust . Setting it to false allows lowercase characters, true chooses the default behavior.

Enabling subpages
In, subpages are enabled on a per-namespace basis using . For example, to enable subpages in the main namespace:

Image uploads
Before users are allowed to upload files to the MediaWiki system, you have to enable that feature. Make sure the Upload Directory is properly configured and writeable by the Apache web server process. Then set  to true to allow uploading in the web user interface.

i.e. Here's some example code from includes/DefaultSettings.php to put in :

If you want to be able to resize images on the fly to support thumbnails, MediaWiki needs a working ImageMagick installation. Set  to true once you have installed and tested ImageMagick on your system. Make sure ' points to the proper location of the command of your installation, that the command is executable by the web server process, and ' is large enough. See for detailed information and troubleshooting.

Also, you may want to modify the list of accepted extensions, which is stored within  :

In case ImageMagick outputs an error message similar to the following:
 * Fatal error: mime_magic could not be initialized, magic file is not available in includes/MimeMagic.php on line 506

then try adding the following line to :

Interwiki support
InterWiki support is built into MediaWiki but you need to configure the prefix to be used for your internal links. This prefix is usually the same as, but in case you need to change that, you set the  variable to the preferred name.

Language of user interface
MediaWiki allows for a variety of localized user interfaces languages instead of the English default. If you want to run your wiki in a non-English language, set the  variable to the proper language code (e.g. "de" for German, "es" for Spanish, etc.)

You may use any of the languages with a file in the directory. E.g. if you find, then you can use   for Spanish. Do not use  with a capital letter. Although it seems to work, not all texts are translated.

Not all languages are supported. See here for a list of the localisation statistics of. See translatewiki.net for the statistics per released version.

Setting copyright for the site

 *  is the page on the wiki that covers the copyrights that it falls under. Usually, this will be Project:Copyrights.


 * <tvar name=RightsUrl> is the page describing full details of your license. (For the GNU FDL, for example, this would be .)


 * <tvar name=RightsText> is the text in the footer that follows "Content is available under". It will be linked to the page specified in.


 * <tvar name=RightsIcon> is the URL of the image placed at the left of the footer.

To modify the copyright statements of the site, add something like this to :

Afterwards, edit MediaWiki:Copyright to provide an appropriate message, using  to indicate the position where the link to your copyright page will be.

Example: setting a Creative Commons license

To set a Creative Commons license do the following:


 * Choose your license: http://creativecommons.org/choose/
 * Examine the returned HTML code, e.g.:


 * For  enter the href info from the first anchor:


 * For  enter the text the second anchor links from (add the "a" to the Wiki variable for a more grammatically correct version)


 * For  enter the src info from the img link in the first anchor. You want to copy the badge to your own site instead of using the one from the Creative Commons site.


 * For using RDF metadata about copyright add one or both of the following lines to your :

Custom namespaces
By declaring ', and modifying ' , and ' , extra namespaces can be added to a MediaWiki installation; and by declaring the ' array namespace aliases can be added. Take heed not to have any pages already titled in that namespace, for instance if you had a page called "Technical:Support" and you created the Technical: namespace, then that page would not only be lost, but you cannot remove it from Special:Allpages. To fix this delete the namespace, move "Technical:Support" to "Support" in mainspace, delete the redirect, reinsert the namespace, and move it back to "Technical:Support". See for more information as to how to do so.

Skins
The default skin of the site can be modified via <tvar name=DefaultSkin>.