How To Install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software, used to power wiki websites such as Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Commons, developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and others. It is very powerful, multilingual, extensible, customizable, reliable, and free of charge. Being a free-to-use and open-source software gives you the flexibility to customize it to suit your needs.

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 MediaWiki on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Install the LAMP stack.

A Ubuntu 20.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing MediaWiki on Ubuntu 20.04.

Now we download the latest stable version of MediaWiki from the official website:

wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.35/mediawiki-1.35.1.tar.gz

Unpack the MediaWiki archive:

sudo tar -zxvf mediawiki*.tar.gz
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/mediawiki
sudo mv mediawiki-1.351/* /var/www/html/mediawiki

We will need to change some folders permissions:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/mediawiki/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/mediawiki/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for MediaWiki.

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;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mediawiki.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> exit;

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for MediaWiki.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘mediawiki.conf’ on your virtual server:

touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mediawiki.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mediawiki/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/mediawiki/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo a2ensite mediawiki.conf 
sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Set up HTTPS.

We should enable a secure HTTPS connection on MediaWiki. We can obtain a free TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Install the Let’s Encrypt client (Certbot) from Ubuntu 20.04 repository:

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache

Next, run the following command to obtain a free TLS certificate using the Apache plugin:

sudo certbot --apache --agree-tos --redirect --staple-ocsp --email you@example.com -d example.com

If the test is successful, reload Apache for the change to take effect:

sudo apache2ctl -t
sudo systemctl reload apache2

Step 7. Accessing MediaWiki Web Interface.

MediaWiki will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to https://your-domain.com/ and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed MediaWiki. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing MediaWiki on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official MediaWiki website.