Project:Support desk

Welcome to MediaWiki.org's Support desk, where you can ask MediaWiki questions!

There are also other places where to ask :

• IRC
• mailing lists
• Wikimedia Developer Support
• Q&A
• mwusers (unofficial forum)

Before you post

• Make sure you have read our fundamental introduction.
• Please carefully check our FAQ and Errors and Symptoms pages.
• Project:Current issues is where you should discuss issues about the mediawiki.org website itself.
• If your question is about a specific function, please read the relevant technical manual , end-user help or extension page and consider asking on its talk page .
• Test wiki editing at the Project:Sandbox.

Post a new question

1. To help us answer your questions, please always indicate which versions you are using (reported by your wiki's Special:Version page):
   • MediaWiki
   • PHP
   • Database
2. Please include the URL of your wiki unless you absolutely can't. It's often a lot easier for us to identify the source of the problem if we can look for ourselves.
3. To start a new thread, click "Start a new topic".

Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at Project:Support_desk/old on 2015-07-30.

I would like to change the font size for my wikipedia pages, it is too small for reading! Could someone please help me with that? Thanks!

Zoom in (Ctrl++) the page.

Or include personal CSS rules for increasing the font size. Either include those rules in the page User:Zyiyu/Vector.css or use browser extensions such as Stylus (Chrome, Firefox) for this.

Is it possible to bookmark an article so that I could later find it very easily? I know there is a feature called "watch", but that is not for bookmarking. Thanks!

Watched pages are listed at Special:EditWatchlist, which can in a way be used as a bookmarks page.

When I reach the environmental checks page, I get this:

PHP 7.0.27 is installed.

Warning: Could not find APCu, XCache or WinCache.

Object caching is not enabled.

GNU diff3 not found.

Could not find GD library or ImageMagick.

Image thumbnailing will be disabled.

Git version control software not found.

The only true statement there is that PHP 7.0.27 is indeed installed. However, it is correctly configured with APCu, Zend OpCache, diff3, and ImageMagick. I run separate software that utilizes all these extensions just fine; somehow, MediaWiki can't find them.

The only setting in LocalSettings.php that seems to reference an extension is:

$wgImageMagickConvertCommand = '/usr/bin/convert';

... and that indeed is the path to imagick.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong here?

Scott

Please use phpinfo(); to check you really installed these things. These warnings shouldn't affect normal installation.

Yep, phpinfo confirms they are installed, and as I mentioned, they're working with other software.

I'm actually upgrading this MediaWiki (from 1.28.0), and these things didn't work then either. I've just decided to try and figure out what's wrong. As you said, MediaWiki will install okay, it's just slow because of no caching and no imagemagick.

Scott

Without ImageMagick, MediaWiki will not be able to create thumbnails. Actually, I believe that MediaWiki is only searching some default paths for ImageMagick; it will not find the installation, if it in fact is at another place.

See Manual:$wgImageMagickConvertCommand for more information. You might be able to figure the correct path to ImageMagick using which -a convert on the shell.

...and note that $wgUseImageMagick needs to be set to true!

Yeah, I've already checked all that. Imagemagick is in the standard place, and the path is correctly set in LocalSettings.php : $wgImageMagickConvertCommand = '/usr/bin/convert'

There's something bigger going on, because MediaWiki can't see any of those other extensions (APCu, diff, etc) that are built-in to the PHP install. It's as if MediaWiki is unable to access directories above the public_html directory. Does MediaWiki need to be uploaded using the root user? (I wouldn't think so, but I'm running out of ideas here).

Scott

> Does MediaWiki need to be uploaded using the root user?

No, normally it is working if uploaded as any normal user as well.

I would now check the debug log. See Manual:How to debug for information on how to enable it!

Afterwards, I would again visit a page inside the Image namespace, where MediaWiki would normally try to create a thumbnail, if using ImageMagick in fact is activated.

I expect the debug log to afterwards contain the ImageMagick command used - and also the return code in case of an error...

OK, I fixed this. What a mess.

As recommended in the documentation, I had turned on FastCGI PHP handler (PHP-FPM). When you do this, certain PHP functions are automatically disabled: proc_open(), exec(), and shell_exec(). Without these, MediaWiki won't use ImageMagick or diff. Editing php.ini has no effect; the functions are disabled elsewhere.

The instructions here will show you how to get those functions enabled: https://forums.cpanel.net/threads/enabling-php-fpm-forces-disable_functions.590799/

Now, all these functions are a security risk, and are recommended to be disabled. Why MediaWiki feels the need to use shell_exec() to access ImageMagick, I don't know; it doesn't need to do that. /rant off

Thank you for your assistance and attention!

Scott

Because ImageMagick is an external program.

Yes MediaWiki might have to use lots of external programs to do all the things it can do. This is because some of those tools are sometimes simply better than what PHP can deliver. Within the Wikipedia/Wikimedia world, this isn't such a problem, because we have lots of seasoned system administrators, who know what they are doing.

Having these things off in default PHP installations is however not a bad default, I have to agree. It just makes it a little bit more difficult to setup MediaWiki unfortunately. Maybe we should have some sort of detection logic for such disable_functions, to make it easier to complete the MediaWiki installation.

Hello there,

i am trying to install Mediawiki , but I have this problem at creating databases name and users name and the along password:

Cannot access the database: :real_connect(): (HY000/1045):

could anyone please help me how to deal with this error ?

thanks in advanced

Make sure your database is already started.

I'm looking at using Module:String#replace to take a multi-paragraph piece of text and return only the first paragraph. I can't seem to find the scribunto/lua way to specify a carriage return or new line. Any ideas?

{{#invoke:String|replace
|source  = INPUTTEXT
|pattern = (.*)NEWLINESYMBOL
|replace = %1
}}

Input:

The quick brown

fox jumps over the

lazy dog

Intended output:

The quick brown

I am running mediawiki 1.32 on a https://... domain and this hides referrers when users click out to external websites. I would like to make it always show referrers.

One way to do this is to add <meta name="referrer" content="always"> to all pages, however I am having difficulty adding this meta tag in mediawiki 1.32.

Is there an easy way to achieve this functionality?

Good day,

Summary: I've followed all the steps outlined in the manual, but the Short URL isn't working - I receive a 403 error. Without short URLs, the site works fine.

Setup: Apache web server, website root = /var/www/html/w

Details:

In the LocalSettings.php file, I've added the below lines under the $wgSitename.

$wgScriptPath = "/w";

$wgScriptExtension = ".php";

$wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";

$wgUsePathInfo = false;

In the httpd.conf file, I've added the below lines.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^/?wiki(/.*)?$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/w/index.php [L]

RewriteRule ^/?$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/w/index.php [L]

For the /var/www and /var/www/html directories, I've ensured the below options are in place:

<Directory /var/www...>

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

AllowOverride none

Require all granted

</Directory>

So, after all that I get a 403 error. When I check the server logs, it tells me there's a AH01630: client denied by server configuration: /var/www/html/wiki.

What's strange is, I don't have a wiki folder anywhere.

Any assistance would be much appreciated, thanks!

Also, I've restarted Apache a few times just to be sure it wasn't a caching issue or something, but it didn't make a difference.

Hi we have a media wiki hosted by a cloud provider and I need to move the content to a new one I have setup on our local network. I have tried the export and import but am confused by the Interwiki prefix error. What do I need to enter into the field ?

Also is there any way of exporting the user accounts to the new wiki?

Thanks in advance

As far as I have found there is "only" these: Extension:UserExport / Extension:ImportUsers- this will export in .CSV format.

However it looks like you will be allowed to see the passwords, and that may giver some issues... depending on your users views/needs for privacy... if this is at all an possible problem you should perhaps prompt the users to create new logins. (Some GDPR issues may pop up?)

I do not know if you can make/reserve the usernames with random passwords, then mail them.. and ask/force them to change the password! (also, perhaps take a look at this: Wikimedia Security Team/Password strengthening 2019 )

2019-04-24 18:31:05 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during near_match search for 'and' after 31: index_not_found_exception: no such index [DFI_WIKI_132_SBX_content]

2019-04-24 18:31:05 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during full_text search for 'and' after 3: parsing_exception: [query_string] query does not support [auto_generate_phrase_queries]

2019-04-24 18:31:58 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during prefix search for 'and' after 18: index_not_found_exception: no such index [DFI_WIKI_132_SBX_content]

2019-04-24 18:32:00 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during prefix search for '"' after 9: index_not_found_exception: no such index [DFI_WIKI_132_SBX_content]

2019-04-24 18:32:01 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during prefix search for '""' after 18: index_not_found_exception: no such index [DFI_WIKI_132_SBX_content]

2019-04-24 18:32:03 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during prefix search for '"s"' after 13: index_not_found_exception: no such index [DFI_WIKI_132_SBX_content]

2019-04-24 18:32:03 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during prefix search for '"sd"' after 33: index_not_found_exception: no such index [DFI_WIKI_132_SBX_content]

2019-04-24 18:32:03 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during prefix search for '"sdf"' after 15: index_not_found_exception: no such index [DFI_WIKI_132_SBX_content]

2019-04-24 18:32:04 VP-171885 DFI_WIKI_132_SBX: Search backend error during full_text search for '"sdf"' after 18: parsing_exception: [query_string] query does not support [auto_generate_phrase_queries]

This is the error I am getting while searching after installing Elastic Search.

Above is the full detail of error. Please help to solve the problem.

Can someone explain why I need the "interwiki prefix" when I import pages from an other wiki. Say I have "Wiki One"and I now want to export pages from this and import them to "Wiki Two". I do not want any reference to "Wiki One" from "Wiki Two"... so why do I need to give provide the interwiki prefix?

( I understand that interwiki is a way for us to point to an other wiki, say Mediawiki:Project:Support desk (that clearly did not work as I expected... :-/ ) - but i don't understand why "Wiki Two" is not the default value when I import pages... ??)

How/where do I report a bug in the export/Import function?

As described (Topic:Uye29i84q604oqjw ) I am having serious problems when importing pages that contains category references. That is the categories are not updated/maintained - I tried to create a category prior to the import. From this there are these symptoms:

• The pre-created category is populated only with new pages.
• New Categories are created (when I import pages containing categories), they are blank but can be updated.
• Imported pages can not be categorized, placing them in the existing/new or imported categories does not work... !
• (There seems to be a short delay on the registration - indicating that the job queue is actually running?)

(...can I otherwise verify that the job queue is running? Is that shown on some of the special pages or in a log?)

Please help - since this is a new/blank Wiki I can open this up to anyone that may want to try to import/test their own pages. Once the bug has been found I will start over..

See "Report wrong software behavior or a feature proposal" on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki linking to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/How_to_report_a_bug

All bug reports should be made in phabricator with an accurate reproduction scenario.

To correct, you can run the script Manual:Rebuildall.php to force an update of all the indexes.

Thanks, I do not have access to run PHP from a command line, so I did try to reinstall/update using the /mw-config/ option, but that did not rebuild the indexes. Is there any other ways to this, or do I need to move to a server/host that will allow me to run PHP? (I have a few other reasons to do so, but I have some 400 wiki pages and those was what I would really want to work with ... :-O )

Is there no other ways to run the rebuild the indexes (and to do other maintenance jobs without PHP comandline?)...

I just - to make sure that this was not an issue between MediaWikis - tried to export from https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export and then import to my Wiki. This gave the same result: http://www.medomtanke.dk/Mac_OS and this is how the category looks http://www.medomtanke.dk/Kategori:1984_software (after I have edited the category page... )