Topic on Project:Support desk

Can someone please help me through the steps of setting up a wiki farm? I found the Mediawiki Manual for WikiFamilies to be just too confusing and not clear on a number of steps.

I have XAMPP to run MYSQL and Apache. I have a 1.29.1 copy of Mediawiki to use.

What I'm looking to do is set it up like this:

1 installation of Mediawiki in the HTDOCS folder of XAMPP. The folder name is "wiki". To use multiple databases via MYSQL on the localhost database. Database names are "zephyr", "schaede", and "devereaux".

I want the settings so that I can use this to browse the wikis I create.

127.0.0.1/zephyr/index.php/Main_Page - Zephyr Wiki 127.0.0.1/schaede/index.php/Main_Page - Schaede Wiki 127.0.0.1/devereaux/index.php/Main_Page - Devereaux Wiki

But all extensions and the like are found in the base "wiki" folder in HTDOCs inside my XAMPP installation.

Can someone please help me do this? I have searched and searched online, but I just can't find any detailed help that doesn't flood me with geek-speak about all kinds of stuff. What would really be nice is if Mediawiki would offer a Wikifarm installer you could easily configure with the browser during your initial installation.

Which specific sentences in the existing manual (link?) are hard to understand, so someone could help clarifying them?

I tried following the directions.

1) I stuck Mediawiki 1.29 into a folder in HTDOCs and named it "wiki". 2) I went into the Browser and ran the configuration, setting up LocalSettings.php for my first wiki "Zephyr". 3) I saved LocalSettings.php as LocalSettings-zephyr.php 4) I repeated steps 2 and 3, changing to Schaede and Devereaux, and subsequently getting LocalSettings-schaede.php and LocalSettings-devereaux.php

5) I then went in and tried to create LocalSettings.php as it listed in the page, with the calls back on the method localhost/zephyr (for wiki 1), localhost/schaede (for wiki 2), and localhost/devereaux (for wiki 3)

Using localhost/zephyr worked, but the other two won't. I tried finding out how to get the others working, but couldn't understand it. XAMPP uses Apache, and from what I can understand Apache has to have a virtual hosts file edited, but that didn't work. And trying to use the HOSTS file in my Windows, which Apache said needed doing, also didn't work.

All I got for my trouble is when trying to use the wiki, the Ports on XAMPP started blinking from 80,443 to numbers over 50000 for some reason.

Please link to "the directions", as requested before. If something "didn't work" please explain how you set "the calls back on the method" exactly.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family

These are the steps I did from that page.

Upload MediaWiki files to web folder on the webserver.

Set up initial wiki as usual. For details, see Manual:Installation guide. After successful installation, move LocalSettings.php into the root directory of your wiki and rename it in such a way to make it easy to track (e.g. LocalSettings_myFirstWiki.php) Repeat step two and three above for each wiki you wish to create, creating a new LocalSettings.php file for each wiki (e.g., LocalSettings_anotherWiki.php, etc.) If two or more separately installed wikis are to be merged to operate out of files of the main wiki, then after renaming and moving each of your LocalSettings.php files to the main wiki folder, change the variable $wgScriptPath in each of the LocalSettings.php files to point to the main wiki's folder.

            If your wikis are on the same domain but different paths (e.g. yourdomain.com/wiki1, yourdomain.com/wiki2 etc), you can use something like this:

<?php // Include common settings to all wikis before this line (eg. database configuration)

$callingurl = strtolower( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ); // get the calling url if ( strpos( $callingurl, '/wiki1' ) === 0 ) {

       require_once 'LocalSettings_wiki1.php';

} elseif ( strpos( $callingurl, '/wiki2' ) === 0 ) {

       require_once 'LocalSettings_wiki2.php';

} elseif ( strpos( $callingurl, '/wikiN' ) === 0 ) {

       require_once 'LocalSettings_wikiN.php';

} else {

       header( 'HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found' );
       echo "This wiki (\"" . htmlspecialchars( $callingurl ) . "\") is not available. Check configuration.";
       exit( 0 );

But the second and third wikis do not work.