Wikibase/Installation

This page provides a step-by-step instruction how to install a basic version of Wikibase. It just explains the minimal configuration needed for Wikibase. If you're interested in a more advanced configuration, please refer to the advanced configuration guide. More complete documentation can be found in the docs folder of the Wikibase source repository: see doc.wikimedia.org.

=Prerequisites=

MediaWiki
Technically, Wikibase is an extension (actually two extensions) to MediaWiki, so you need to set up MediaWiki first.

Composer
The easiest way to install all dependencies of Wikibase is using Composer. Here you can find installation instructions for Composer.

=Installation= A basic installation of Wikibase is pretty much straight forward and basically consists of 4 steps: The following guide will lead you through these steps.
 * 1) getting Wikibase
 * 2) fetching dependencies
 * 3) modifying LocalSettings.php
 * 4) running some maintenance scripts.

Meet the prerequisites
Make sure you've set up MediaWiki and installed Composer.

Get Wikibase
Download the version of Wikibase that matches your Mediawiki installation into the extensions folder of your MediaWiki installation. There are several ways to download Wikibase.

Download from Git
Make sure the folder you just downloaded is called  and located in
 * For getting the latest unstable version of Wikibase, do:
 * You should use a version of Wikibase that corresponds with the version of MediaWiki itself. For getting a specific version of Wikibase you have to specify the branch you want to download. For example, to install Wikibase for Mediawiki version 1.34.x use the Wikibase branch REL1_34:

Download archive

 * Instead of using Git you can alternatively download an archive with the latest version of Wikibase or choose to download a specific version of Wikibase.
 * Make sure you extract the archive into a new folder called  inside the extensions folder of your MediaWiki installation.

Fetch all dependencies
Using the composer-merge-plugin

Include the following into  at the root of your mediawiki installation:

and run from the root of your mediawiki installation using just one of these methods:

Adjust your LocalSettings.php
Add the following lines to LocalSettings.php of your MediaWiki installation. You have three options, depending on whether you want to enable Wikibase Repository, Wikibase Client or both of them.

Enable Wikibase Repository only
Important: If you're using master or 1.36 (and above) you need to use extension registration instead. The above code will fail:

Enable Wikibase Client only
For another lang-wiki client, like Farsi, change the siteGlobalID to: Important: Similar to above, if you're using 1.36 or master, you need to use this instead:

Enable Wikibase Repository and Wikibase Client
These configurations assume that your interwiki prefixes are  and. Adjust as needed.

Important: Similar to above:

Run the setup scripts
Finally, you have to run some maintenance scripts.


 * Run the database update script of your MediaWiki installation:


 * Run the script that populates the sites table:

Note: By default, this populates the sites table with Wikimedia's project list. See Manual:Sites table for options to list non-WMF projects.

For Wikibase Repository only

 * Run

For Wikibase Client only

 * If you want to run a Wikibase Client, you'll also need to run the script that populates the interwiki table:

This will overwrite existing links in your interwiki table with (by default) Wikipedia values. Don't do this if you have existing inter-language link data you need to keep.

For Wikibase Repository and Wikibase Client
(Again, running populateInterwiki.php will overwrite existing links in your interwiki table with (by default) Wikipedia values.)

Wikibase Repository
To verify your Wikibase Repository installation, in your MediaWiki go to Special:NewItem and you should be able to create your first Item. Enter a label and optional description and aliases and hit Create. You should be redirected to the item page.

Wikibase Client
If you've enabled Wikibase Client and everything is correct, you should see an "Add links" link in the languagelinks section in the sidebar of the main page.

Enable Sitelinks
Sitelinks are special links that contain a site and a title, and go from individual Items to pages on other wikis. In Wikidata these go to other Wikimedia sites such as Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikivoyage. Among other things, Sitelinks are used to allow referencing a property of the Item on the linked page in the client wiki, a feature that is called Direct access.

1. Configure your sitelink groups
First, you need to think about how to group the client-wikis you want to see in your sitelinks area on the Items in your repo-wiki.

Define custom groups
In your repo-wiki, replace the content of  in   with the groups you would like to see there.

For example, consider the following line being added to :

This will allow three groups in the SiteLinks box on the Item's page:
 * the standard defined  for the global Wikipedia sites
 * two custom wikis groups – here named  and   just for example

The names defined here will be relevant to the  field in the   table as specified below.

In your client-wiki, add the same siteLinkGroups

Deactivate the sitelinks feature
If you do not want your installation to make use of sitelinks at all, then you can deactivate that feature by setting the configuration to an empty array:

2. Localize your own groups
To show the correct heading for your own groups, you have to create the page with the desired heading as text.

You can create subpages to set the heading in different languages, e.g.  to create the German heading.

3. Add the Wikis to the sites table
To be able to add sitelinks to Items in your repo-wiki, you need add the client-wikis to the sites table. Take care that the group name used there must be one of the group names you added above. Following the example above, for instance, there would be one or more sites with  and   as text in the   field. Please also note that you need to set both the file path and the page path, and they do need to include the  placeholder. To add your wiki an id ending on wiki to the mywikigroup group, run Be sure to do this on the repo-wiki and all client-wikis, so that the "add links" in the other languages section works correctly.

For further details on how to add sites to the table, please see these specific instructions.

4. Let the repo-wiki know about the databases of the other client-wikis
localClientDatabases: An array of locally accessible client databases, for use by the  script. This setting determines which wikis changes are pushed to directly. It must be given either as an associative array, mapping global site IDs to logical database names, or, if the database names are the same as the site IDs, as a list of databases. The default is an empty array, indicating no local client databases.

5. Verify that you can add sitelinks

 * 1) Go to   in your repo-wiki and try to link an existing Item (field "ID") to one of the above configured sites (field "Site ID") by providing an existing page on that wiki (field "Sitelink"). It should either work or give you a useful error message.
 * 2) On the page you added above, check that Direct access works by referencing a property of the Item in a parser function

There are very few languages I can set labels for in a new item
Make sure you installed Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector

There are no sites I can link pages to in an item
One or more of the following may help:

= References =