How To Install MediaWiki on AlmaLinux 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MediaWiki on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, MediaWiki is free and open-source software that helps users collect and organize information. Mediawiki assists you in gathering and organizing knowledge and making it accessible to others both in and out of your organization. It is extremely powerful, multilingual, expandable, adjustable, dependable, and completely free.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MediaWiki on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: AlmaLinux 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install MediaWiki on AlmaLinux 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install epel-release

Step 2. Installing a LAMP server.

An AlmaLinux LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing MediaWiki on AlmaLinux 8.

By default, MediaWiki is not available on the AlmaLinux 8 base repository. Now we download the latest stable version of MediaWiki from the official page:

wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.37/mediawiki-1.37.1.tar.gz

Next, extract the downloaded file:

tar -xvzf mediawiki-*.tar.gz
sudo mv mediawiki-*/ /var/www/html/mediawiki/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/mediawiki

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the MediaWiki. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for MediaWiki installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE mediawiki_db;
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'mediawiki'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mediawiki_db.* TO 'mediawiki'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-strong-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
MariaDB [(none)]> ALTER DATABASE mediawiki_db charset=utf8;
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> EXIT;

Step 5. Configure Apache.

We will create an Apache virtual host for your Adminer using the following commands:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/mediawiki.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin admin@your-domain.com
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mediawiki/
     ServerName your-domain.com
     DirectoryIndex index.php
     ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/mediawiki-error.log
     CustomLog /var/log/httpd/mediawiki-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Save and close the file, then restart the Apache service for the changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl restart httpd
sudo systemctl enable httpd

Step 6. Secure Apache with Let’s Encrypt SSL Free Certificate

First, we install Certbot using the following command below:

sudo dnf install certbot python3-certbot-apache

Then, install the SSL certificate for Apache as below:

sudo certbot --apache

Proceed to an interactive prompt and install the certificate. If the certificate is installed you will see the below congratulatory message:

Deploying certificate
Successfully deployed certificate for your-domain.com to /etc/httpd/conf.d/your-domain-le-ssl.conf
Congratulations! You have successfully enabled HTTPS on https://your-domain.com

NEXT STEPS:
- The certificate will need to be renewed before it expires. Certbot can automatically renew the certificate in the background, but you may need to take steps to enable that functionality. See https://certbot.org/renewal-setup for instructions.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:
 * Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt:   https://letsencrypt.org/donate
 * Donating to EFF:                    https://eff.org/donate-le
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Step 7. Configure Firewall.

Allow the firewall to HTTP and HTTPS and reload it with the following commands:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Step 8. Accessing MediaWiki Web Interface.

Once successfully installed, open your web browser and access the MediaWiki using the URL https://your-domain.com. You will be redirected to the following page:

Congratulations! You have successfully installed MediaWiki. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the MediaWiki on your AlmaLinux 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official MediaWiki website.