Manual:Installation

This page guides you through the process of installation of the latest stable version on linux. There is another page for installation from Subversion. The 1.6 series is the last to support versions of PHP earlier than PHP 5.

There are also guides for installing MediaWiki on Windows and IIS, which is a little harder:
 * Installing MediaWiki on Windows XP -> Installing MediaWiki on Windows XP - MediaWiki 1.9.2
 * Installing MediaWiki on Windows Server 2003 SP1
 * see also other guides:

MediaWiki can be difficult to install for the average computer user who does not have experience with Apache, PHP and MySql. Most users who wish to use wiki software may benefit from using a free wiki host (see a list of wiki hosts on Wikibooks).

Minimum system requirements
The recommended minimum settings is 256MB of RAM for a single-computer website, although this will not suffice for a busy public site. Some users have reported running MediaWiki on computers with as little as 48MB of RAM.

Prerequisites
Before you can install MediaWiki, there are four prerequisite components you must install. When you install these, remember to read the associated documentation. If your website is hosted for you then contact the server administrators or hosting company to ensure these are installed.


 * 1) An Apache web server, available at the official download page.
 * 2) * MediaWiki also apparently runs 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 (MySQLi or PostgresSQL) 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, 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 very new and not as well tested as the MySQL equivalent.
 * 12) MediaWiki itself, which is available from the official download page. Development versions are available from the Sourceforge.net project page.

Download and uncompress
Download MediaWiki to your local computer and uncompress the files, so that you can see the files and folders. This is usually done with software such as 7-Zip (open source software), WinZip, WinRAR or IZArc on Windows. On Linux, you can untar the file using this command: tar xvzf mediawiki-*.tar.gz

Upload
Upload the files to a public directory (usually public_html/wiki) using an FTP client such as FileZilla (Open Source Software, Windows), SmartFTP (Windows) or Cyberduck (OSX). If you are using a Unix server and have access to the httpd.conf, make a Symbolic link.

Change the permission settings for the "config" subdirectory so that it is writable by the webserver. If you are using FileZilla, right-click on the directory, select "attributes...", and check "Write" under "Owner". If it prompts you for a number instead or you are using a command-line interface, use 755 (Use 777 on Linux except for RedHat Linux). Alternately, you may be able to change permissions using a "control panel" provided by your web host.

Depending on the server configuration, in some cases you have to check all boxes (777) in FileZilla, to be able to run the install-script of MediaWiki.

Troubleshooting
chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/mediawiki/*
 * Case: If you are using a different FTP client than FileZilla, be sure to configure the client to not force uppercase or lowercase filenames on the webserver. MediaWiki filenames are case-sensitive.
 * Incomplete uploads: The pack includes a lot of files, spread over dozens of directories. Be careful when uploading. If the transfer is interrupted, you might have missing or incomplete files. You may have to retry your upload several times, especially if you have an unreliable connection.
 * Internal error: If your webserver produces a "500 Internal Error" at the beginning of the install process, you may need to change the permissions on the config folder to 755.
 * SELinux: Linux distributions which support SELinux ('Security Extensions') are becoming more widespread. On such systems, PHP scripts will still be unable to write to the config directory, after you have set the normal file permissions. You will also need to use the 'chcon' command to change the SELinux file type. See SELinux.
 * If you are running the Mediawiki software on a free site that requires banners or prefix advertising, this may cause MediaWiki not to work, and appear to only generate empty pages beyond the banner advertising. A fix for this will need to be done in the future.  In the interim the only option is to find a paid hosting site.  This may be considered a bug, and is being reported.
 * Config directory unwritable: If you have changed the permissions for the config directory and still get an unwritable error try changing the owner to apache.

Create a database
Currently, you must use either MySQL or Postgres to store the actual contents of your wiki.

MySQL
The MySQL database server stores the text and data of your wiki.


 * If you know the root password for your database server, (the password for the user called "root") the MediaWiki setup script can automatically create a database and an account to access it.
 * If you don't know the root password for your MySQL server, for example if you don't have the password because you are using a shared host, you need to create a MySQL database and a user before installing MediaWiki. You can do this using various control panels such as PhpMyAdmin, which are often available from shared hosts, or you may be able to use ssh to login to your host and type the commands into a MySQL prompt. See the corresponding documentation. Alternatively, contact your host provider to have them create an account for you.


 * 1. Download and install MySQL 5.0. It should put itself in /usr/local/mysql
 * 2. Check and see if the database server is running ("/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin status"), If not, sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/safe_mysqld &. (For Fedora Core 5, use /usr/bin/mysqld_safe)
 * 3. Set a password for the "root" account on your database server. /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password yourpassword
 * 4. Set up a user in MySQL for your Wiki--do this in your terminal: /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p mysql
 * 5. This starts up the MySQL command line client. Now, do this in the client:

create database wikidb; grant create, select, insert, update, delete, lock tables on wikidb.* to 'wikiuser'@'localhost' identified by 'password'; flush privileges; \q

If your database is not running on the same server as your web server, you need to give the appropriate web server hostname -- mediawiki.example.com in my example -- as follows: grant create, select, insert, update, delete, lock tables on wikidb.* to 'wikiuser'@'mediawiki.example.com' identified by 'password';

Postgres
If you are using Postgres, you will need to either have a database and user created for you, or simply supply the name of a Postgres user with "superuser" privileges to the configuration form. Often, this is the database user named postgres.

The database that MediaWiki will use needs to have both plpgsql and tsearch2 installed. The installer script will try and install plpgsql, but you may need to install tsearch2 yourself. (tsearch2 is used for searching the text of your wiki). Here's one way to do most of the setup. This is for a Unix-like system, and assumes that you have already installed the plpgsql and tsearch2 modules. In this example, we'll create a database named wikidb, owned by a user named wikiuser, with a password of "pgrocks". From the command-line, as the postgres user, perform the following steps.

createuser -S -D -R -P -E wikiuser(then enter the password) createdb -O wikiuser wikidb createlang plpgsql wikidb

Adding tsearch2 to the database is not a simple step, but hopefully it will already be done for you by whatever packaging process installed the tsearch2 module. In any case, the installer will let you know right away if it cannot find tsearch2.

The above steps are not all necessary, as the installer will try and do some of them for you if supplied with a superuser name and password.

For installing tsearch2 to the wikidb database under Windows, do the following steps: 1. find tsearch2.sql (probably under .\PostgreSQL\8.x\share\contrib) and copy it to the postgresql\8.x\bin directory; 2. from a command prompt at the postgresql\8.x\bin directory, type "psql wikidb < tsearch2.sql -U wikiuser"; 3. it will prompt you for the password for wikiuser; That's it!

point 2. seems only to work on windows, cause on debian linux 4.0 (etch) only user postgres is allowed to use language c. so there it must be called by:

su - postgres -c psql wikidb < tsearch2.sql

afterwards you must grant select rights to wikiuser to the tsearch table's and insert the correct locale.

su - postgres echo 'grant select on pg_ts_cfg to wikiuser;' |psql wikidb echo 'grant select on pg_ts_cfgmap to wikiuser;' |psql wikidb echo 'grant select on pg_ts_dict to wikiuser;' |psql wikidb echo 'grant select on pg_ts_parser to wikiuser;' |psql wikidb echo 'update pg_ts_cfg set locale=`$LANG` where ts_name=`default` and prs_name=`default`'| psql wikidb

if the last line 'update' in the above box does not work try the following in the psql shell (see also in discussion):

psql wikidb update pg_ts_cfg set locale = current_setting('lc_collate') where ts_name = 'default'; \q

Run the installation script
Use your browser to visit the wiki directory on your webserver to run the installation script. If you are running a distribution with SELinux, e.g. Fedora Core, be sure to set the context on the installation directory correctly e.g.: ls -aZ chcon -R system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t wiki If you installed into public_html/wiki, this will probably be something similar to  http://www.yourdomain.com/wiki . Depending on how you uploaded the files, you may need to visit  http://www.yourdomain.com/wiki/config </tt> instead. Follow the installation instructions on the installation script page. Refer to the following table if you're uncertain what to enter.

Click the "Install!" button.

If you are using a hosting service, note that the database name and database username may have an extra prefix (normally the userid given by your hosting provider). For example, if you have created a database named db01 with username u01 and your userid is ocom (given by your hosting provider), you should enter the database name and database username as ocom_db01 and ocom_u01 respectively.

This may or may not apply to MySQL 5.x, but with MediaWiki 1.8.3 and MySQL 4.1.21 installed with UTF-8 as the default character set, there may be a MySQL error of the type "specified key was too long". One way of solving that is to choose "Backwards-compatible UTF-8" in the installation script and edit the file maintenance/tables.sql so that the table causing the problem uses shorther keys. For example, if you find the error message: PRIMARY KEY job_id (job_id), KEY (job_cmd, job_namespace, job_title) ) TYPE=InnoDB " failed with error code "Specified key was too long; max key length is 1024 bytes (localhost)".

Then you should find table "job" in tables.sql and modify varchar(255) to something shorther, eg varchar(242) as following.

-- Jobs performed by parallel apache threads or a command-line daemon CREATE TABLE /*$wgDBprefix*/job ( job_id int(9) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,  -- Command name, currently only refreshLinks is defined  job_cmd varchar(242) NOT NULL default '',

-- Namespace and title to act on -- Should be 0 and '' if the command does not operate on a title job_namespace int NOT NULL, job_title varchar(242) binary NOT NULL,

-- Any other parameters to the command -- Presently unused, format undefined job_params blob NOT NULL default '',

PRIMARY KEY job_id (job_id), KEY (job_cmd, job_namespace, job_title) ) TYPE=InnoDB; Then you should delete tables you have made before, and then run the install script again. If you still see the same error, you can change the 255 to a even smaller number, eg varchar(150), and then repeat the above steps again. See also MediaWiki bug 4445.

Missing table prefix
A MySQL installation of MediaWiki 1.8.2 on a shared host failed to display the database table prefix input box. The form field was generated in the configuration page with no-display attributes. If you experience this problem, the addition of the //</tt> characters to config/index.php</tt> as shown below will cause this field to re-materialize. This input box is not needed unless more than one MediaWiki instance is being installed into a single database, so most installations will not need to do this, whether the field is present or not. <?php // database_switcher('mysql'); ?> <?php aField( $conf, "DBprefix", "Database table prefix:" ); ?>

Note: the problem persists in MediaWiki 1.9.3.

Local settings
After setup, a file called LocalSettings.php</tt> is created in the "config" directory. This file contains all the information needed by MediaWiki to run. If it does not find the file in the main folder, it will launch the installation script to create a new one in the "config" directory.


 * 1) Move this file to the main wiki directory (if you installed MediaWiki to public_html/wiki</tt>, move it there). Do not leave a copy in the config folder, as this poses a severe security risk.
 * 2) Set stringent permissions on the LocalSettings.php</tt> file. ( chmod 600 and chown )
 * 3) Delete the entire "config" directory.

Advanced configuration
For help with more advanced technical configuration, see Help:Configuration and Help:Administration.

For a brief overview that addresses the empty help pages and text and layout modification, see Help:Installation-Software_Configuration.

Uninstallation
Removing MediaWiki entirely can be accomplished in two steps: removing the directory where MediaWiki was installed, and dropping the MediaWiki database from MySQL or Postgres.

For example, if you installed MediaWiki to /var/www/mediawiki-xyz, you might do

rm -r /var/www/mediawiki-xyz

MySQL
To remove the MySQL database holding your wiki, use the mysql utility to interactively connect to MySQL as a user with adequate permissions, then issue the following command at the mysql> prompt:

DROP DATABASE wikidb;

(If you needed to retain some tables, you could also drop just some of the tables individually. See this MediaWiki-L message for details.)

Postgres
To remove the Postgres database holding your wiki, run the following command:

dropdb wikidb;

You can also connect as a superuser using the psql program and issue:

DROP DATABASE wikidb;