How To Install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 16.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of MediaWiki on your Ubuntu 16.04 server. 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 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 a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• 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 16.04

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

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install imagemagick php7.0-intl php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql

Step 3. Installing MediaWiki.

The first thing to do is to go to MediaWiki’s download page and download the latest stable version of MediaWiki, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.8.7:

wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.27/mediawiki-1.27.1.tar.gz

Unpack the MediaWiki archive to the document root directory on your server:

tar -xvzf mediawiki-1.27.1.tar.gz
mv /opt/mediawiki-1.27.1/ /var/www/html/mediawiki

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data.www-data /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 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 wikidb;
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'wikiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'y0uR-passW0rd';
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wikidb.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

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:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
rm /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf
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:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing MediaWiki.

MediaWiki will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.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 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official MediaWiki website.

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