Help:Installation

This page covers the installation of the MediaWiki on the UCL HEP servers. For instructions on configuring the MediaWiki once installation is complete, see the Configuration help page.

The installation on the HEP www server followed the online instructions from the MediaWiki Installation Guide.

Detailed instructions on the installation process can be found in the Installing MediaWiki Manual page.

Some more instructions are available from the Elemental Linux Server MediaWiki Installation Guide.

The Installation process follows the following stages:

Download Software

All current and previous releases of he MediaWiki software are available from the MediaWiki Releases website. It is recommended to download the latest version: this is normally listed on the Installing MediaWiki Manual page.

The first version installed of the PBTWiki was carried with MediwWiki release 1.16.5: this was the most recent version that didn't require a version of PHP more recent than 5.1.6, which was the version on the HEP www server as of April 2016.

It is possible to download the MediaWiki software from Git: however, this is normally meant for developers and the bleeding edge version isn't needed for the PBTWiki.

Extract Software

Once downloaded, the software needs to be unpacked in the appropriate location. On the UCL HEP Linux systems, this is /unix/www/html/pbt/pbtWiki. This is equivalent to the web address http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/pbt/pbtWiki, which is the full address for the PBTWiki.

Create Directory for SQLite Database

All the data for the MediaWiki needs to be stored in a database. During installation there is the choice of using either MySQL or SQLite: SQLite was chosen as it required the least overhead to get set up. The SQLite database is a single file that has the *.sqlite extension. No local database users are created for a MediaWiki SQLite database: access is purely through the web interface by editing pages or viewing the relevant Special Pages.

For the PBTWiki, the SQLite database resides in the directory /unix/www/pbt/. The resulting database is stored at /unix/www/pbt/pbtwiki.sqlite: this database is created automatically during the installation process (see the Run Setup Script section below).

Note that for the MediaWiki to read and write to the database correctly, both the database file and the directory in which it resides must be writeable by the Apache process (ID 48). Apache is the software that runs the HEP www server. It has a specific username (apache, ID 48) and group (also apache, ID 48). In order to access the database, the directory and database either need to be owned by user apache (48) or by group apache (48). If it is a member of group apache (48) but not owned by user apache (48), both the file and the directory also need to have their permissions set to be group writeable.

For the PBTWiki, the /unix/www/pbt/ directory is owned by user apache but is a member of the webadmin group; the /unix/www/pbt/pbtwiki.sqlite database file is owned by user jolly but is a member of the group apache with appropriate group write permissions.

Run Setup Script

Once the software has been downloaded and unpacked and the directory has been created for the SQLite database, the final stage is to run the PHP setup script. This is accomplished by navigating to the root directory of the MediaWiki through a web browser. This should load a page hat gives information on the setup and asks to set a number of options.

For the PBTWiki, the following options were selected:

Wiki name

PBTWiki

Copyright/license

No license metadata

Object caching

No caching

Email features (global)

Enabled

User-to-user email

Enabled

E-mail notification about changes

Enabled for changes to user discussion pages, and to pages on watch lists

E-mail address authentication

Enabled

Database type

SQLite

Database name

pbtwiki

SQLite data directory

/var/www/pbt/

Note that the SQLite data directory is /var/www/pbt/ and not /unix/www/pbt/. This is because, if logged in directly to the HEP www server (only possible by a HEP sysadmin), web data is stored in /var/www/. This area is then mounted as /unix/www/ as seen from any other Linux machine in the cluster. However, the apache process is running directly on the www server itself, so the local directory name needs to be used.

Configuration

Once these steps have been completed, you can move on to configuring your MediaWiki.