Debian packages

I maintain packages of MediaWiki for Debian and Ubuntu. These follow the LTS cycle and are kept up to date with maintenance and security releases. In the past these packages did weird things to MediaWiki like moving files around, patching random parts of the code, replacing bundled libraries with different versions, etc. My goal is to not do that as much as possible and as allowed by the distribution's policies. In addition, I am also maintaining and updating other MediaWiki related packages like wikidiff2 and texvc.

Supported operating systems

 * Debian Stretch (currently in testing)
 * Debian Jessie coming soon!
 * Ubuntu Xenial via a PPA
 * Ubuntu Trusty via a PPA

Installation
If you are using Debian Jessie, you'll need to enable jessie-backports. Ubuntu users will need to enable the PPA. This will install MediaWiki, PHP, a webserver (if necessary), and maybe a database server.

Depending on whether you automatically install packages in the  field, it may also install MySQL/MariaDB server, but that isn't required as SQLite will also work well. PostgreSQL is also supported, but is typically more buggy.

Any webserver may be used, however the package will automatically configure Apache to serve the wiki at http://localhost/mediawiki/ using mod_php. Other webservers will require manual configuration.

You should then follow the steps in the web installer to set up MediaWiki.

Filesystem

 * - MediaWiki core
 * - Data like images, cache, and extensions
 * - where you should put your config and stuff