MediaWiki

Warning:

This page is a work in progress and is not completed. Important informations might be missing or wrong.

Warning:

These instructions were only tested on Debian. It will probably work for other Linux distributions, but you might need to adapt the provided instructions.

Install MediaWiki

Warning:

Debian packages are currently unmaintained and outdated. This guide will install MediaWiki from source. For your security, don't forget to follow upstream releases and update your installation.

Prerequisite

DNS

This guide assume that you are using a dedicated subdomain for your wiki like https://wiki.example.com. Don't forget to point that domain to your webserver.

Database

You will need a database server store all dynamic data (users, articles…). You can check the MariaDB installation guide.

Nginx

In this guide, we will use Nginx as a web server. Please check the Nginx installation guide.

Get source

# cd /var/www
# curl https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.26/mediawiki-1.26.2.tar.gz | tar xz
# chown -R www-data: mediawiki*

Configure Nginx

create certificate

update nginx config

/mw-config

chown root:www-data /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php
chmod 640 /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php

Install Extensions

ParserFunctions

This extension is bundled by default with MediaWiki. You just need to activate it.

Add the line wfLoadExtension( 'ParserFunctions' ); to the file /var/www/mediawiki*/LocalSettings.php

SyntaxHighlight

This extension is bundled by default with MediaWiki. You just need to activate it.

Add the line wfLoadExtension( 'SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi' ); to the file /var/www/mediawiki*/LocalSettings.php

TemplateData

Allows you to describe your templates using structured data for a better experience with the VisualEditor.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TemplateData

MobileFrontend

Because a lot of your traffic will come from mobile devices.

• Download MobileFrontend
• Extract it in /var/www/mediawiki*/extensions/
• Add the following to /var/www/mediawiki*/LocalSettings.php

  require_once "$IP/extensions/MobileFrontend/MobileFrontend.php";
  $wgMFAutodetectMobileView = true;
  # disable talk and watch features
  $wgMFPageActions = array( 'edit', 'upload' );
  

For more information, check the extension documentation

Speedup

By default the MediaWiki installation is pretty slow.

Localisation cache

Uncomment the line about $wgCacheDirectory in /var/www/mediawiki*/LocalSettings.php.

## Set $wgCacheDirectory to a writable directory on the web server
## to make your wiki go slightly faster. The directory should not
## be publically accessible from the web.
$wgCacheDirectory = "$IP/cache";

Page cache

# Enable generated page cache
$wgUseFileCache = true;
$wgFileCacheDirectory = "$IP/cache";

Enable CronJob

First create the log file

# touch /var/log/mediawiki-runJobs.log
# chown www-data:adm /var/log/mediawiki-runJobs.log
# chmod 640 /var/log/mediawiki-runJobs.log

Then add the following line in /etc/crontab

0  0    * * *   www-data /usr/bin/php /var/www/mediawiki-1.26.2/maintenance/runJobs.php > /var/log/mediawiki-runJobs.log

Finally you can disable jobs running on user visits in /var/www/mediawiki*/LocalSettings.php

# Jobs are run by the cronjob. No need to run them on use visits
# https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgJobRunRate
$wgJobRunRate = 0;

You can check the number of jobs in the queue at https://wiki.example.com/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics&format=jsonfm

Other Settings

Capital Links

By default, MediaWiki forces the first letter of a page title to be upper case. The advantage of it is that you can omit the first capital in links,

Eg. You have a page named Test. You can link to it like This is a [[test]].

The drawback is that you can't create a page with lower case title.

Change that in /var/www/mediawiki*/LocalSettings.php.

$wgCapitalLinks = false;