Mediawiki setup

Typical configuration options

In LocalSettings.php (possible locations: /var/lib/mediawiki/, /var/lib/mediawiki/config/, or /etc/mediawiki/)

Change your logo (picture in top-left corner):

$wgLogo = "http://urlpath/to/my/logo/picture.png";

Disable new user creation:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

Disable editing and creating pages by anonymous users:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createpage'] = false;

Disable reading by anonymous users, except for certain pages:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false;
$wgWhitelistRead =  array ( "Main Page", "Special:Userlogin");

Creating another wiki on the same webserver

• create a new directory (say wiki2) in the document root.
• lndir the /opt/mediawiki to the new directory,
• assign the appropriate permissions to directories and
• visit the wiki (http://localhost/wiki2) for configuration. Make sure that the database name, user and table prefix are different for this wiki.

Recovering wiki after upgrade

This is what happened: I upgraded Ubuntu to 8.04 and all of a sudden my wiki was unreachable... Investigation showed that there is a new mediawili installed, wiping almost all of the old configuration, including the /var/lib/mediawiki-?? with links.

Luckily I had the Localhost.php with settings in the old /etc/mediawiki-?? directory that was not wiped. After investigating I found that the content of the wiki remained in the mysql database. That gave me a hope, and this is what I did:

• recreated mysql passwords for the wikiuser and mysql-root. You can reset root password - stop mysql and start the daemon with no-

• • reset mysql root password

 sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
 sudo mysqld --skip-grant-tables
 mysql -u root 
 mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('password') WHERE User='root';
 mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; 
 mysql> exit
 sudo mysqladmin shutdown -u root
 sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

• • Change mysql wikiuser password

 $ mysql -u root -p
 mysql> use mysql;
 mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD("NEWPASSWORD") where User='wikiuser';
 mysql> flush privileges;
 mysql> quit

• created a new root directory for the wiki (actually several for several wiki's)

sudo mkdir /var/lib/wiki

• used lndir to create links in the new directory

cd /var/lib/wiki
lndir <insert your parameters here>

• added the following fragment to set up mediawiki with apache2: create/add this in /etc/mediawiki/apache.cnf

Alias /wiki /var/lib/wiki

#=== My wiki ===
<Directory /var/lib/wiki/>
       Options +FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride All
       order allow,deny
       allow from all
</Directory>

# some directories must be protected
<Directory /var/lib/wiki/config>
       Options -FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/lib/wiki/upload>
       Options -FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride None
</Directory>

• made sure /etc/apache2/conf.d has a link to the file above (in /etc/mediawiki/apache.conf)

• started web pointing to http://example.com/wiki and
• set all the parameters as before, except using the new mysql passwords as appropriate.
• compared the newly created Localsettings.php with my old (if present) and copied that into /var/lib/wiki, and set the permissions so that it could not be changed by anyone or read by anyone but the www-data (webserver).