To compare mediawiki with dokuwiki I installed mediawiki on my little shack server.

I followed the instructions here

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

and did a few tweaks etc. to get things running.

I forgot to document the tweaks!

So I thought there would be no harm in installing it on my VPS to run alongside the main dokuwiki site, with a view to deciding whether to switch to mediawiki later.

Here are my steps to install mediawiki on the VPS machine, which already has a fully configured and working webserver & PHP. The main addition will be setting up a SQL server (probably MariaDB).

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

wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.38/mediawiki-1.38.1.tar.gz

tar zxvf mediawiki-1.38.1.tar.gz

sudo mkdir /var/www/html/mediawiki

sudo mv mediawiki-1.38.1/* /var/www/html/mediawiki

That has installed a SQL server and the mediawiki files into the webserver root. Next is to configure the SQL database to hold the wiki.

gm4slv@gm4slv:~$ sudo service mysql START
gm4slv@gm4slv:~$ sudo mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome TO the MariaDB monitor.  Commands END WITH ; OR \g.
Your MariaDB connection id IS 36
Server version: 10.3.34-MariaDB-0+deb10u1 Debian 10
 
Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab AND others.
 
TYPE 'help;' OR '\h' FOR help. TYPE '\c' TO clear the CURRENT INPUT statement.
 
MariaDB [(NONE)]> CREATE USER 'new_mysql_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mwPass';
Query OK, 0 ROWS affected (0.018 sec)
 
MariaDB [(NONE)]> quit;
Bye

gm4slv@gm4slv:~$ sudo mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome TO the MariaDB monitor.  Commands END WITH ; OR \g.
Your MariaDB connection id IS 37
Server version: 10.3.34-MariaDB-0+deb10u1 Debian 10
 
Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab AND others.
 
TYPE 'help;' OR '\h' FOR help. TYPE '\c' TO clear the CURRENT INPUT statement.
 
MariaDB [(NONE)]> CREATE DATABASE my_wiki;
Query OK, 1 ROW affected (0.003 sec)
 
MariaDB [(NONE)]> USE my_wiki;
DATABASE changed
MariaDB [my_wiki]> GRANT ALL ON my_wiki.* TO 'new_mysql_user'@'localhost';
Query OK, 0 ROWS affected (0.001 sec)
 
MariaDB [my_wiki]> quit;
Bye

Browse to https://gm4slv.org.uk/mediawiki and got an error message that there was a PHP component missing intl

sudo apt-get install php-intl

sudo service apache2 restart

Browse to mediawiki again and all seems well. The message now is that LocalSettings.php is missing, which is created at the next step, following the on screen link.

Configure the SQL access:

Database Username : new_mysql_user
Database Password : mwPass

Complete the questions, select the required extensions etc. and download the LocalSettings.php file. Then upload the file to the VPS and put it in /var/www/html/mediawiki

Make sure images directory has ugo+rwx permissions

Somehow upload a logo.png into images and edit LocalSetting.php to point at the log:

$wgLogos = [
        '1x' => "$wgResourceBasePath/images/logo.png",
 
 
        'icon' => "$wgResourceBasePath/images/logo.png",
];

to be continued

sudo apt install ghostscript imagemagick xpdf-utils 

add to LocalSettings.php:

$wgPdfProcessor = '/usr/bin/gs';
$wgPdfPostProcessor = $wgImageMagickConvertCommand; // if defined via ImageMagick
// $wgPdfPostProcessor = '/usr/bin/convert';  // if not defined via ImageMagick
$wgPdfInfo = '/usr/bin/pdfinfo';
$wgPdftoText = '/usr/bin/pdftotext';
 
 
$wgFileExtensions[] = 'pdf';

Now upload a pdf file and it should appear in the file brower.

Try putting it in a page with the <gallery> funtion

<gallery>
File:Blog.pdf|page=1
</gallery>

— John Pumford-Green 29/06/22 15:15

Page last updated: 06/03/25 06:49 GMT