Manual:Installation requirements

This page provides information on installing the prerequisites of MediaWiki: Apache, PHP, and MySQL. After you have installed the prerequisites, please see Manual:Installing MediaWiki. For more information see Manual:Installation.

The recommended minimum settings are 256MB of RAM for a single-computer website and 40 MB 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.

MediaWiki has three required prerequisites and a number of optional prerequisites. Remember to read the documentation for each individual component before installation. If your website is hosted (ie you don't have direct control over it) then contact the server administrators or hosting company to ensure these are installed.


 * 1) A web server. Most installations use the Apache web server, available at the official download page.
 * 2) * MediaWiki has also been tested under IIS 6.0, Cherokee, and lighttpd.
 * 3) * Sun has some installation instructions for running Mediawiki on the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0.
 * 4) A recent version of PHP, the programming language in which MediaWiki is written. This is available from the official download page. As of version 1.7 PHP 5.x is required -- PHP 4.x is not supported from this version onwards.
 * 5) * See PHP config for compiling options
 * 6) * Some Linux servers may also require the equivalent MySQL package and PHP session management package; see the documentation for the operating system.
 * 7) * 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.
 * 8) * If your Apache server has the Hardened PHP patch, you may need to edit several variables in your /etc/php.ini file if you wish to have Wiki pages with large amounts of content. In particular, consider the settings for varfilter.max_value_length, hphp.post.max_value_length, and hphp.request.max_value_length.  The default settings may limit your pages to less than 10k or 64k in size.
 * 9) * Many people report blank pages in recent versions after submitting articles to their new wiki. A likely cause is the memory limit in default php installations (usually 8 MB). Please check your PHP and/or Apache error logs. To modify this setting edit  and increase the "memory_limit" setting. For example to  raise it to 20 MB replace the existing text with " ". Make sure to restart your Apache server after you have changed this value.
 * 10) A MySQL database server (4.0 or later), which will be used to store all the text and data. This is available from the official download page.
 * 11) * As of version 1.8, Postgres is also supported. It should be noted that support for Postgres is new and not as well tested as the MySQL equivalent.