How To Install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 14.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of MediaWiki on your Ubuntu 14.04. 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 written in the PHP programming language and uses a backend database.

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. I will show you the step-by-step installation of MediaWiki on Ubuntu 14.04.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 14.04.
• 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 Ubuntu 14.04

Step 1. First of all, make sure that all packages are up to date.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install the LAMP server and include some PHP extensions.

sudo apt-get -y install apache2 mysql-server mysql-client php5 php5-mysql php5-gd php5-curl php5-intl php5-json imagemagick unzip

Start service Apache web server and MySQL also enable it to start on boot of the server:

/etc/init.d/apache2 start
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Step 3. Configuring MySQL for MediaWiki.

By default, MySQL is not hardened. You can secure MySQL 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 MySQL:

mysql_secure_installation

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

mysql -u root -p

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

mysql> CREATE DATABASE mediawikidb;
mysql> GRANT index, create, select, insert, update, delete, alter, lock tables on mediawikidb.* TO mediawikiuser@localhost;
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit

Step 4. Install MediaWiki.

Download the latest stable version of MediaWiki, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.25.1:

wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.25/mediawiki-1.25.1.tar.gz
tar xvzf mediawiki-*.tar.gz
sudo mv /var/www/html/* ~/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/

Restart the Apache service for the changes to take effect:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Step 6. Accessing MediaWiki.

MediaWiki will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com or http://server-ip 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.

At the end of the installation, you will need to upload the file to /var/www/html. You can do that via FTP, but to speed up the process, just open the downloaded file with a text editor, copy all the content from it and paste it to a new LocalSettings.php file that you can create using the following command:

nano /var/www/html/LocalSettings.php

Congratulations! You have successfully installed MediaWiki. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing MediaWiki in Ubuntu 14.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official MediaWiki website.

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