Extension:Lockdown

The Lockdown extension implements a way to restrict access to specific namespaces and special pages to a given set of user groups. This provides a more fine grained security model than the one provided by the default $wgGroupPermissions and $wgNamespaceProtection settings.

The following pages about the security model used by MediaWiki per default may be helpful to understand the instructions below:
 * Manual:User rights
 * Manual:$wgGroupPermissions

Installing
Copy the Lockdown directory into the extensions folder of your MediaWiki installation. Then add the following lines to your LocalSettings.php file (near the end):

To use Lockdown to prevent access to Special:Export and restrict editing of the project namespace to logged in users (registered users), you can then use the following:

See below for an explanation and more examples.

Configuration
Note that the Lockdown extension can only be used to *restrict* access, not to *grant* it. If access is denied by some built-in setting of MediaWiki, it cannot be allowed using the Lockdown extension.

$wgSpecialPageLockdown
$wgSpecialPageLockdown allows you to specify for each special page which user groups have access to it. For example, to limit the use of Special:Export to logged in users, use this in LocalSettings.php:

Note that some special pages "natively" require a specific permission. For example, Special:Userrights, which can be used to assign user groups, required the "userrights" permission (granted only to the "bureaucrat" group per default). This restriction can not be overridden using the Lockdown extension.

Some special page titles not capitalized the way they appear on-wiki. For instance, Special:RecentChanges is Recentchanges internally, so to restrict it you need:

A full list of special page titles is available in /includes/specials/.

$wgActionLockdown
$wgActionLockdown allows you to specify for each action which user groups have access to it. For example, to limit the use of the history page to logged in users, use this in LocalSettings.php:

Note that some actions can not be locked down this way. In particular, it will not work for the ajax action.

$wgNamespacePermissionLockdown
$wgNamespacePermissionLockdown lets you restrict which user groups have which permissions on which namespace. For example, to grant only members of the sysop group write access to the project namespace, use this:

Wildcards for either the namespace or the permission (but not both at once) are supported. More specific definitions take precedence:

The first two lines restrict all permissions in the project namespace to members of the sysop group, but still allow reading to anyone. The third line limits page moves in all namespaces to members of the autoconfirmed group.

Note that this way, you cannot *grant* permissions that have not been allowed by the build-in $wgGroupPermissions setting. The following does *not* allow regular users to patrol edits in the main namespace:

Instead, you would have to grant this right in $wgGroupPermissions first, and then restrict it again using $wgNamespacePermissionLockdown:

Note that when restricting read-access to a namespace, the restriction can easily be circumvented if the user has write access to any other namespace: by including a read-protected page as a template, it can be made visible. To avoid this, you would have to forbid the use of pages from that namespace as templates, by adding the namespace's ID to $wgNonincludableNamespaces (this feature was introduced in MediaWiki 1.10, revision 19934, and is also available as an extension for earlier versions):

You can of course also use Lockdown with custom namespaces defined using $wgExtraNamespaces:

Note that custom namespaces should always be define in pairs, the namespace proper (with an even id), and the associated talk namespace (with an odd id).

If you want to use constants to refer to your namespaces, you need to define them:

Managing groups
You can control which user belongs to which groups with the page Special:Userrights. Only existing groups will be proposed, but you can "create" a new group by creating an entry for it in Manual:$wgGroupPermissions (even if you don't actually need to set a permission there, but it has to appear on the left hand side of the array). For example:

For more information, see Help:User rights, Manual:User rights, and Manual:User rights management.

Hiding pages
The Lockdown extension may prevent page content from being shown, but it does not remove inaccessible pages from listings. To hide such pages, several patches must be applied to MediaWiki. See Extension:Lockdown/hiding_pages for some (unofficial) suggestions. See also mediawiki-l/2009-June/031231.html.

Images and other uploaded files
Images and other uploaded files still can be seen and included on any page. Protections on the Image namespace do not prevent that. See Manual:Image Authorisation for information on how to prevent unauthorized access to images. See also:
 * Extension:Simple Security,
 * Extension:SimpleSecurity4
 * Extension:NSFileRepo - MW 1.13 and after

Redirects
For MediaWiki 1.10 and earlier: If a redirect  to a page P in a protected namespace PNS has been placed on an unprotected page and the page has been loaded, it will lead the user to the protected page, regardless the user belongs to the required usergroup or not.

This problem does not appear to exist in MediaWiki 1.11 or later.