MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the wiki platform behind Wikipedia. It helps you collect and organise knowledge and make it available to people. It’s powerful, multilingual, free and open, extensible, customisable, reliable, and free of charge.

Last update: 2024-05-05

Note

For this guide you should be familiar with the basic concepts of

License

MediaWiki is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Extensions and skins may be released under different licenses than MediaWiki itself. Most of them are usually distributed with a copy of their respective licenses and copyright notices.

Prerequisites

Uberspace satisfies or exceeds all MediaWiki requirements out of the box.

Note

Uberspace only supports PHP 8.x, however the main MediaWiki documentation notes: “PHP 8 is not in use by Wikimedia wikis, and thus gets less testing, but other groups do use MediaWiki with PHP 8 without issue. If you encounter any bugs when using MediaWiki with PHP 8, please report them.”

Set up a new database for MediaWiki:

[isabell@stardust ~]$ mariadb -e "CREATE DATABASE ${USER}_mediawiki"
[isabell@stardust ~]$

Your MediaWiki domain needs to be setup:

[isabell@stardust ~]$ uberspace web domain list
isabell.uber.space
[isabell@stardust ~]$

Installation

Official, generalist installation manual for Mediawiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installing_MediaWiki

Change into your document root, download the latest MediaWiki release found at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download (here 1.41.1) and extract.

[isabell@stardust ~]$ cd html
[isabell@stardust html]$ wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.41/mediawiki-1.41.1.tar.gz
[isabell@stardust html]$ tar -xzvf --strip-components=1 mediawiki-*.tar.gz
[isabell@stardust html]$ rm mediawiki-*.tar.gz

At this point, the wiki installer should be available at https://<UberspaceUsername>.uber.space/, click “complete the installation” to start the graphical configuration. Leave default values or change as desired. On the “Connect to database” page:

Database name: <UberspaceUsername>_mediawiki
Database username: <UberspaceUsername>
Database password: find out using my_print_defaults client

When the graphical installation completes, locally download the LocalSettings.php that should have been automatically generated and transfer it to ~/html on your Uberspace. This can be achieved using one of the tools suggested on SFTP with host sftp://<UberspaceUsername>.uber.space and your Uberspace credentials.

After this, the installed wiki should be available under https://<UberspaceUsername>.uber.space

Tested with MediaWiki 1.41.1, PHP 8.3.6 and Uberspace 7.15.14.1

Written by: Doug Webb <https://dougwebb.site>