Difference between revisions of "How to Setup a MediaWiki 1.27 Server on a Debian 9 Proxmox container"
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Revision as of 10:07, 9 July 2019
MediaWiki is an excellent software package that almost instantly gives you a highly functional, highly configurable wiki. It is what powers Wikipedia and this wiki too!
This article describes how I setup a MediaWiki server on a Debian 9 based Linux Container (LXC) under Proxmox and made the page available using an Apache2 Reverse Proxy.
In the case of a MediaWiki instance I'm more interested in stability, ease of installation, and ease of updating over having the latest features. Therefore I'm installing the version distributed with Debian 9 (1.27 at the time of this writing) even though the latest available version is 1.32 at the time of this writing). Furthermore I'll be configuring MediaWiki the way I like it and installing some extra packages and extensions that I find useful.
I use nano as the command line text editor of choice here. Once you've finished editing the text file click Ctrl-X and then Y to save the file.
Contents
Setup the Container
- Using the Proxmox web interface, create a new Container using the Debian 9 template.
- Log into the container, with the root account, using the Proxmox web console
- Update, Upgrade, and Install a few packages
- run apt update
- run apt upgrade
- run apt install sudo unzip
- Update the timezone
- run timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York
- change America/New_York to a location relevant to your physical location using the "TZ database name" in this table
- run timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York
- Add a user and give them sudo access
- useradd admin
- usermod -aG sudo admin
- Exit the web console and ssh in as the admin user
Setup Prerequisite Packages
- Install the packages we'll need
- First install the required prerequisite packages (note that the package mysql-server actually installs MariaDB which is great! MariaDB is an open-source fork of MySQL).
- sudo apt install apache2 mysql-server php php-mysql libapache2-mod-php php-xml php-mbstring
- Next install some useful extra packages
- sudo apt install php-apcu php-intl imagemagick php-gd php-curl git
- Restart apache2 to make it aware of php-apcu
- sudo service apache2 reload
- First install the required prerequisite packages (note that the package mysql-server actually installs MariaDB which is great! MariaDB is an open-source fork of MySQL).
- Setup MariaDB
- Secure the MariaDB installation by running the following command
- sudo mysql_secure_installation
- Ensure the root password is set and answer yes to all of the questions
- Log in to MariaDB with the following command. Enter your root password when prompted
- sudo mysql -u root -p
- Create the mediawiki MariaDB user by typing the following at the MariaDB [(none)]> prompt
- CREATE USER 'mediawiki_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'THISpasswordSHOULDbeCHANGED';
- Create the mediawiki database with the following command
- CREATE DATABASE mediawikidb;
- Grant necessary privileges to the mediawiki user on the mediawiki database with the following commands
- USE mediawikidb;
- GRANT ALL ON mediawikidb.* TO 'mediawiki_user'@'localhost';
- exit the MariaDB console with the following command
- exit;
- Secure the MariaDB installation by running the following command
- Configure PHP
- edit the apache2 php config file with the following command
- sudo nano /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini
- change upload_max_filesize to at least 20M
- change post_max_size to at least 20M
- ensure that that memory_limit is set to at least 128M
- edit the apache2 php config file with the following command
- Configure Apache2
- Add an Alias for your wiki
- run sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
- add Alias /wiki /var/lib/mediawiki to the bottom of the file
- Add an Alias for your wiki
Install & Configure MediaWiki
- run sudo apt install mediawiki
- navigate a web browser to http://server/mediawiki/
- click set up the wiki
- click Continue
- click Continue
- on the Connect to database page
- change Database name: to mediawikidb
- change Database username: to mediawiki_user
- change Database password: to THISpasswordSHOULDbeCHANGED
- click Continue
- click Continue
- on the Name page
- on the name of your wiki in Name of the wiki
- setup an admin account
- click Continue
- on the Options page
- choose your User rights profile: <--- THIS IS IMPORTANT make sure the wiki is setup the way you want it to be. Be aware that an open wiki or a wiki that allows user to create and authenticate their own accounts will almost certainly result in your wiki getting vandalized by automated advertisement/hacking scripts!
- choose your license
- decide if you want email support
- decide if you want to disable any skins
- I recommend enabling the following extensions
- ImageMap
- InputBox
- Nuke
- ParserFunctions
- PdfHandler
- Renameuser
- SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi
- WikiEditor
- turn on Enable file uploads
- click Continue
- click Continue
- click Continue
- Move the LocalSettings.php file generated by the installer to /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php on the target machine with the following
- on the browser machine run sudo scp ~/Downloads/LocalSettings.php user@server:~/
- on the server machine run sudo mv ~/LocalSettings.php /etc/mediawiki/"
- Install and Enable some extra extensions
- MobileFrontend to give your wiki a nicely formatted view when seen from a mobile device
- Get the download link from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor/MobileFrontend
- run wget https://extdist.wmflabs.org/dist/extensions/MobileFrontend-REL1_27-717861c.tar.gz
- run sudo tar -xzf MobileFrontend-*.tar.gz -C /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions
- run sudo chown -R root:root /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions/MobileFrontend/
- run rm MobileFrontend-*.tar.gz
- run sudo nano /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php and add the following to the bottom
- # Enable MobileFrontend
- wfLoadExtension( 'MobileFrontend' );
- $wgMFAutodetectMobileView = true;
- $wgMFDefaultSkinClass = 'SkinMinerva';
- LabeledSectionTransclusion to all you to link labelled section of a page to another page
- Get the download link from: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor/LabeledSectionTransclusion
- run wget https://extdist.wmflabs.org/dist/extensions/LabeledSectionTransclusion-REL1_27-9212396.tar.gz
- run sudo tar -xzf LabeledSectionTransclusion-*.tar.gz -C /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions
- run sudo chown -R root:root /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions/LabeledSectionTransclusion/
- run rm LabeledSectionTransclusion-*.tar.gz
- run sudo nano /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php and add the following to the bottom
- # Enable LabeledSectionTransclusion
- wfLoadExtension( 'LabeledSectionTransclusion' );
- IframePage to allow you load iFrames from other sites into your wiki pages
- run wget https://extdist.wmflabs.org/dist/extensions/IframePage-REL1_27-ca7f4fc.tar.gz
- run sudo tar -xzf IframePage-*.tar.gz -C /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions
- run sudo chown -R root:root /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions/IframePage/
- run rm IframePage-*.tar.gz
- run sudo nano /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php and add the following to the bottom
- # Enable IframePage
- require_once "$IP/extensions/IframePage/IframePage.php";
- $wgIframePageSrc= array( /* REQUIRED! */ );
- MobileFrontend to give your wiki a nicely formatted view when seen from a mobile device
- Enable a wider array of file uploads by running sudo nano /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php and placing the following at the bottom of the file
- # Accepted Upload File Extensions
- $wgFileExtensions = array(
- 'png', 'gif', 'jpg', 'jpeg', 'tiff', 'bmp',
- 'doc', 'xls', 'ppt', 'docx', 'xlsx', 'pptx',
- 'odt', 'ods', 'odp', 'odg',
- 'py', 'py3',
- 'pdf',
- 'pem'
- );
- $wgFileBlacklist = array();
- $wgStrictFileExtensions = false;
- $wgMimeTypeBlacklist = array();
- $wgVerifyMimeType = false;
- $wgMaxUploadSize = 20971520;
You're done! Go visit http://server/mediawiki to start using your brand new wiki!
Bonus
If you want to visit http://server and have it automatically, instantly, redirect the user to http://server/mediawiki run sudo nano /var/www/html/index.html and enter the following into the file
<head> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://server/mediawiki/" /> </head>