Latest revision as of 10:28, 8 July 2021

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 10 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 10 (1.31.14 at the time of this writing) even though the latest available version is 1.36.1 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.

Setup the Container

1. Using the Proxmox web interface, create a new Container using the Debian 9 template.
2. Log into the container, with the root account, using the Proxmox web console
3. Update, Upgrade, and Install a few packages
   1. run

      apt update

   2. run

      apt upgrade

   3. run

      apt install sudo unzip

4. Update the timezone
   1. 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
5. Add a user and give them sudo access by running

   useradd admin

   and

   usermod -aG sudo admin

6. Exit the web console and ssh in as the admin user

Setup Prerequisite Packages

1. Install the packages we'll need
   1. First install the required prerequisite packages by running

      sudo apt install apache2 mariadb-server php php-mysql libapache2-mod-php php-xml php-mbstring

   2. Next install some useful extra packages by running

      sudo apt install php-apcu php-intl imagemagick php-gd php-curl git

   3. Restart apache2 to make it aware of php-apcu by running

      sudo service apache2 reload

2. Setup MariaDB
   1. Secure the MariaDB installation by running

      sudo mysql_secure_installation

      1. Ensure the root password is set and answer yes to all of the questions
   2. Log in to MariaDB with the following command. Enter your root password when prompted

      sudo mysql -u root -p

   3. Create the mediawiki MariaDB user by typing the following at the MariaDB [(none)]> prompt

      CREATE USER 'mediawiki_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'THISpasswordSHOULDbeCHANGED';

   4. Create the mediawiki database by entering

      CREATE DATABASE mediawikidb;

   5. Grant necessary privileges to the mediawiki user on the mediawiki database by entering

      USE mediawikidb;

      and

      GRANT ALL ON mediawikidb.* TO 'mediawiki_user'@'localhost';

   6. exit the MariaDB console by running

      exit;

3. Configure PHP
   1. edit the apache2 php config file by running

      sudo nano /etc/php/7.3/apache2/php.ini

      1. change upload_max_filesize to at least 20M
      2. change post_max_size to at least 20M
      3. ensure that that memory_limit is set to at least 128M
4. Configure Apache2
   1. Add an Alias for your wiki by running

      sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

      and adding a line, at the bottom, that says

      Alias /wiki /var/lib/mediawiki

Install & Configure MediaWiki

1. run

   sudo apt install mediawiki

2. navigate a web browser to http://server/mediawiki/
   1. click set up the wiki
   2. click Continue
   3. click Continue
   4. on the Connect to database page
      1. change Database name: to mediawikidb
      2. change Database username: to mediawiki_user
      3. change Database password: to THISpasswordSHOULDbeCHANGED
      4. click Continue
   5. click Continue
   6. on the Name page
      1. on the name of your wiki in Name of the wiki
      2. setup an admin account
      3. click Continue
   7. on the Options page
      1. 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!
      2. choose your license
      3. decide if you want email support
      4. decide if you want to disable any skins
      5. I recommend enabling the following extensions
         • Special pages
           • Nuke
           • Renameuser
         • Editors
           • WikiEditor
         • Parser hooks
           • ImageMap
           • InputBox
           • ParserFunctions
           • SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi
         • Media handlers
           • PdfHandler
      6. turn on Enable file uploads
      7. click Continue
      8. click Continue
      9. click Continue
3. Move the LocalSettings.php file generated by the installer to /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php on the target machine with the following
   1. on the browser machine run

      sudo scp ~/Downloads/LocalSettings.php user@server:~/

   2. on the server machine run

      sudo mv ~/LocalSettings.php /etc/mediawiki/

4. Install and Enable some extra extensions
   1. MobileFrontend to give your wiki a nicely formatted view when seen from a mobile device
      1. Get the download link for MediaWik 1.31 from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor/MobileFrontend
      2. to make sure you're in your home directory run

         cd ~

      3. run something like (using download link obtained from above)

         wget https://extdist.wmflabs.org/dist/extensions/MobileFrontend-REL1_31-6418f42.tar.gz

      4. run

         sudo tar -xzf MobileFrontend-*.tar.gz -C /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions

      5. run

         sudo chown -R root:root /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions/MobileFrontend/

      6. run

         rm MobileFrontend-*.tar.gz

      7. run

         sudo nano /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php

         and add the following to the bottom

         # Enable MobileFrontend
         wfLoadExtension( 'MobileFrontend' );
         $wgMFAutodetectMobileView = true;
         $wgMFDefaultSkinClass = 'SkinMinerva';

   2. LabeledSectionTransclusion to allow you to link labelled section of a page to another page
      1. Get the download link for MediaWiki 1.31 from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor/LabeledSectionTransclusion
      2. run something like (using download link obtained from above)

         wget https://extdist.wmflabs.org/dist/extensions/LabeledSectionTransclusion-REL1_31-0eb68cc.tar.gz

      3. run

         sudo tar -xzf LabeledSectionTransclusion-*.tar.gz -C /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions

      4. run

         sudo chown -R root:root /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions/LabeledSectionTransclusion/

      5. run

         rm LabeledSectionTransclusion-*.tar.gz

      6. run

         sudo nano /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php

         and add the following to the bottom

         # Enable LabeledSectionTransclusion
         wfLoadExtension( 'LabeledSectionTransclusion' );

5. 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

sudo nano /var/www/html/index.html

<head>
        <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://server/mediawiki/" />
</head>