Manual:Running MediaWiki on Windows/en

This page will give you information about installing on a Microsoft Windows system using standard installation methods. For Windows-only hosting environments, the WIMP stack (using IIS) was recommended over Apache, (WAMP stack) as of 1.18, for manual installs.

Nginx - an alternative to apache and IIS - may be useful if you support MediaWiki across other host operating systems and/or are already using Nginx for internal hosting.

Getting required software
Although these products are not that difficult to configure under Windows, it can be extremely difficult to install (by difficult, it takes 30 minutes for WIMP) and configure Apache+MySQL+PHP one product at a time if completely new to apache/mysql/php. Under such circumstances it is highly recommended to look for a LAMP or WAMP pre-made combination which can just be installed and used. These will save you 99% of the trouble of configuring each package manually. The down-side is that some of these are trimmed down or modified versions which makes it hard to upgrade individual components, and other ones are seriously out of date.

XAMPP
The most popular of which is XAMPP:
 * XAMPP

Bitnami

 * Bitnami is a free suite of compatible installers for open source software. It supports an Nginx stack, Microsoft WAMP ), a generic LAMP stack and XAMPP (which it will not install itself and on which only XAMPP-specific bitnami installers work ). Bitnami installs Mediawiki 1.23 on any of those, and they work alongside Wordpress or other software bitnami supports. See Bitnami itself for instructions  and updated support data. This can be a good option if you intend to use only the long term stable supported mediawiki releases. Support for older versions is not guaranteed. See Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Windows/bitnami for experiences with this method.

WAMP
See http://www.wampserver.com/en/

WIMP
On Azure:.

Diffutils
Diffutils (which contains diff3) can be downloaded from here, and File (file type checker) from here.

To activate the use of diffutils within MediaWiki, you have to ignore the fact that they won't be found during installation (they may actually be found if you install diff into your path) and open up LocalSettings.php to make the following changes:

becomes

and replace:

with

Please note that you have to replace "C:/Progra..." with the actual location where you installed the tools to.

ImageMagick

 * Note: PHP now comes with GD enabled by default which will work for thumbnailing. GD will not require any configuration or modification to be used. Therefore it's highly recommended to not install ImageMagick, since it is known to be unstable. In fact the $wgImageMagickConvertCommand and Image.php mentioned below does not exist in MW1.15.1. However, in MW 1.23 you have to disable ImageMagick in LocalSettings.php by setting $wgUseImageMagick to false.


 * Note: Settings for XAMPP v1.7.7 VC9 and MediaWiki v1.18.1

The "Q8" ImageMagick releases use 8 bits per channel, while the "Q16" releases use 16 bits per channel. Here is the download page for ImageMagick on Windows. To make image thumbnailing work, you will need to open includes/Image.php, locate the line that starts with, and remove the escapeshellarg function, then do the same to the next line, so that the command variable builds like this:

In addition, check to be sure that the  in localsettings.php points to (your imagemagick folder path)/convert.exe
 * Note:
 * use the .exe extension! It won't work, if omitted.
 * use a path without spaces as install path for ImageMagick or use the short name of the path.

Another way to make this work is to add the ImageMagick path to your Windows PATH variable, and simply setting the  in LocalSettings.php as follows (note that you must still modify Image.php as shown above):

Make sure that the Internet Guest Account (Usually IUSR_MACHINENAME) has Read & Execute rights to the ImageMagick bin directory. Without this you might see an PHP shell execution error similar to what happens when it can't find the convert.exe file.

Inkscape
Inkscape can be used as an alternative SVG thumbnailing tool. Here is the download page for Inkscape on Windows. Here are some example settings to enable Inkscape as the SVG thumnailer in the  file:

Mathematics Support
See Texvc.