Mediawiki installation

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I will describe here installation procedure of EduTechWiki and some extensions. We got a brand new server that we'll put online by the end of August:) - Daniel K. Schneider 11:59, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

See also:

Installation tips are for Ubuntu. The old version runs under Solaris (IMHO a superior but much more difficult environment, this is why we decided to switch).

First time installation and upgrading

(To do, I will make this short, since it's not difficult...)

The simplest way is using SVN,

Type something like: 

checkout http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/REL1_18/phase3

Major updates: 

svn switch http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/REL1_7_3/phase3

Minor updates: 

svn update

Configuration

The main configuration file

Unless you use some configuration extension, all the configuration (except for styles and user messages) is done in file LocalSettings.php (in the top-level directory of the distribution)

Reading: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings

LocalSettings.php will read first the file includes/DefaultSettings.php and then override with your own settings. Below are a few settings (also read "nice URLs" below). 

// also used as namespace for certain pages, so select with care
$wgSitename   = "EduTech Wiki";
 
// Use the file cache
$wgUseFileCache = true;
$wgFileCacheDirectory = "$IP/cache";
$wgShowIPinHeader = false; 

// Rights
$wgEnableCreativeCommonsRdf = true;
$wgRightsPage = "EduTech_Wiki:Copyrights"; # Set to the title of a wiki page that describes your license/copyright
$wgRightsUrl = "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/";
$wgRightsText = "CC BY-NC-SA Licence";
$wgRightsIcon = "$wgStylePath/monobook/tecfa/somerights.png";

// Permissions - editing users need to have a login
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit']            = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount']   = true;
# $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount']   = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read']            = true;

// Strongly suggest to keep this (enabled by default). Puts all the messages in the database
// (easier to edit and edits will survive upgrades
$wgUseDatabaseMessages = true;

// What file uploads to you accept, e.g.
$wgFileExtensions = array( 'png', 'gif', 'jpg', 'jpeg', 'ogg', 'pdf', 'mp3', 'svg', 'doc', 'xls', 'ppt', 'pub', 'txt', 'ps', 'zip' );

Messages

Configuring interface messages is quite easy. Use the following procedure, if you can't recall the names of the appropriate Mediawiki pages (each message is defined in its own page).

  1. List all messages with the special page Special:Allmessages
  2. You then can customize each Mediawiki message, by clicking on a message and edit

Notice:

  • Works by default, i.e. $wgUseDatabaseMessages = true;
  • If you are not using database messages, you can edit the languages/Language.php file (for English) or languages/LanguageXX.php for non-English languages, where XX is the two-letter language code for your language
  • Be careful: entering wrong data may disable some messages ....

Each of the Mediawiki:XXX pages you may configure are listed in Special:Allmessages as we said above. The ones you did redefine will be in green. Below are two examples:

A slogan message

The page MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle will allow you to add some sort of slogan (you also can kill this default page). Has the same effect as setting the $wgExtraSubtitle variable.

Sitenotices (e.g. to annonce an important event)

Read: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Interface/Sitenotice

Another way way of using it is to define $wgSiteNotice = " ........ "; in LocalSettings.php

Nice URLs

You don't want ugly default URLs (e.g. http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Mediawiki_installation instead of http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/mediawiki/index.php?title=Mediawiki_installation).

Reading: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL

Here is an easy way to do achieve this for the content pages. The method described below is probably not exactly the one that is now being suggested by the manual, but we have to stick to our old solution since we believe in stable URLS !

In httpd.conf: 

  Redirect /portails/mediawiki  "http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en"
  Redirect /mediawiki  "http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en"
  Redirect /portails/fmediawiki "http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/fr"

<VirtualHost *:80>
       ServerName edutechwiki.unige.ch
       DocumentRoot "/data/portails/edutechwiki"
   # ALIASES for edutechwiki: THREE alias for each WIKI
   Alias /mediawiki "/data/portails/mediawiki"
   Alias /en "/data/portails/mediawiki/index.php"
   Alias /en/index.php "/data/portails/mediawiki/index.php"
   Alias /fmediawiki "/data/portails/fmediawiki"
   Alias /fr "/data/portails/fmediawiki/index.php"
   Alias /fr/index.php "/data/portails/fmediawiki/index.php"
< /VirtualHost >

Then in LocalSettings.php: 

$wgSitename         = "EduTech Wiki";

$wgScriptPath	    = "/mediawiki";
$wgScript           = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";
$wgRedirectScript   = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";

## If using PHP as a CGI module, use the ugly URLs
#   $wgArticlePath      = "$wgScript/$1";
# DKS 3/2006
$wgArticlePath      = "/en/$1";

Therefore only "normal" pages look nice. Special pages remain ugly, but this doesn't matter IMHO.

Also consider excluding all or most special pages in robots.txt. No reason that these should be indexed and they really eat away CPU cycles if you need another argument. 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /mediawiki/
Disallow: /en/Special:Search
Disallow: /en/Special:Random

etc ....

Skins and CSS

Unless you have time to spend, I suggest to use the standard Monobook skin. Other skins are not as well supported. E.g. some extensions just won't work with other skins.

You should define CSS (in particular class or id selectors for extensions) in MediaWiki:Common.css. Do not edit CSS files in the server if you can avoid. This strategy makes maintenance much easier.

Changes to the navigation bar to the left

Reading: Navigation bar help

Configuration: Edit MediaWiki:Sidebar in your wiki

Since version 1.14 (or earlier) you may use keywords to change the order of portlets (boxes with menu items). E.g. 

* SEARCH

* navigation and help
** mainpage|Mainpage
** EduTech_Wiki:About|about
<!-- ** portal-url|portal -->
<!-- ** currentevents-url|currentevents --> 
** randompage-url|randompage
** helppage|Help
** Help:Editing rules|Editing rules
** Blog:DKS|Blog (D.K.S.)

* categorytree-portlet

* TOOLBOX

* LANGUAGES

* big brother
** Special:Newpages|New Pages
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
** Special:Guestbook|Guestbook
** Special:Popularpages|Popular Pages
** Special:WhosOnline|Who is online ?

* TECFA links
** http://tecfa.unige.ch/ |TECFA
** http://tecfaseed.unige.ch/door/ |TECFA Portal

In addition one also could add more sophisticated custom items (instead of hand editing the skin files, to do ....)

Subpages

According to the MediaWiki help pages Subpages can be useful for three major purposes.

  • to create archives of old discussions under a talk page
  • to create scratchpad editing spaces under a user page
  • to create other language versions of a document in multilingual wikis

Slashes (/) within a page name break the page into parent and subpages, recursively

Avoid subpages for regular pages and for two reasons: It's against the wiki/hypertext philosophy and some crucial extensions (like the book creator) can't find them !

Read:

It you plan to enable supages everywhere, use: 

# Enable subpages in all namespaces
$wgNamespacesWithSubpages = array_fill(0, 200, true);

Else use something like: 

$wgNamespacesWithSubpages =
     array(
	NS_TALK           => true,
	NS_USER           => true,
	NS_USER_TALK      => true,
	NS_PROJECT_TALK   => true,
	NS_IMAGE_TALK     => true,
	NS_MEDIAWIKI_TALK => true,
       NS_TEMPLATE       => true,
	NS_TEMPLATE_TALK  => true,
	NS_HELP_TALK      => true,
	NS_CATEGORY_TALK  => true,
       102  => true,
       103  => true
)

Adding extra namespaces

Some extensions, e.g. wikilog or semantic mediawiki use additional namespaces. It is difficult to know what namespaces are used and more so what index number they are.

  • To list the prefixes in use the pull-down menu: Special:PrefixIndex
  • To figure out the index number look at the source of the above page.

E.g. you will see something like this: 

<option value="100">Admin</option>
<option value="101">Admin Discussion</option>
<option value="102">STIC</option>
<option value="103">STIC Discussion</option>
<option value="104">Blog</option>
<option value="105">Blog talk</option>
<option value="106">COAP</option>
<option value="107">COAP Discussion</option>
<option value="110">Property</option>
<option value="111">Property talk</option>
<option value="114">Form</option>
<option value="115">Form talk</option>
<option value="116">Concept</option>
<option value="117">Concept talk</option>
<option value="118">Filter</option>
<option value="119">Filter talk</option>

Extensions

See also the Mediawiki article where we list extensions we find useful to have. Here, we only document installation and/or configuration of the more difficult ones.

Download and documentation: You will find most extensions on MediaWiki.org. The Extensions category page will provide several entry points. I sort of like the Extension_Matrix page.

General extension installation principles

Most extensions are well documented, just read the instructions and follow them. However, since some are badly maintained you sometimes will have to read the discussion page for finding appropriate patches...

A checklist of things to look at and to do:

(1) Check if the extension is compatible with your MW version (this is not always obvious, therefore you also should look for hints in its dicussion page).

(2) Read the discussion page that will tell you something about the quality of an extension.

(3) Download the extension either as archive (zip etc.) or via subversion. Some simple extensions are just available as code section from the wiki page that you must copy to a file.

  • To use subversion you must install a client, then for example just type: svn co http:the_subversion_URL_of_the_extension'
  • Make sure that the files sit in a directory unless its a simple single file extension
  • Move the extension directory to the extensions folder of your installation
  • Add all the extra stuff an extension may need. This can sometimes be a lot (e.g. a days work!), sometimes nothing). Most extensions are simple and don't need other server-side programs.
  • If the extension needs a cache, you may have to change write permissions in some subdirectory.
  • Load and configure:
    • Edit LocalSettings.php to configure and to load the extension.
    • You may have to define configuration variables in the LocalSettings.php file and/or by defining Mediawiki:XXX pages
    • You may have the option to add CSS definitions to the MediaWiki:Common.css pages
    • Sometimes you need to define templates.

Server modifications

Some extensions, e.g. the book creation tools need a lot of RAM and CPU. You may have to increase, e.g.

In php.ini: 

max_execution_time = 600
max_input_time = 600
memory_limit = 100M

In httpd.conf: 

Timeout 600

Collection extension

There exist two ways of using this PDF/OO/DocBook book generator. Just install the extension files and use the PediaPress server for generating the PDF or OO documents. This strategy did not work out well and we use our own server. Installation is fairly complex.

Most important documentation and download pages
Extension page Collection: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection
Extension page PDF_Writer: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PDF_Writer
MwLib/Collection server installation guide (if needed): http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/wiki/mwlib-install
See Mediawiki collection extension installation for our own installation notes

Additional software needed if you install your own MwLib (at least)

Dependencies
  • Perl => 5
  • g++
  • Latex
    • Also compile texvc in mediawiki/math directory
  • Blahtexml
The mwlib server and tools

PDFExport and PDF Book

Generate PDF for a page or all articles in a category page. These extensions use a free (and old version) of Htmldoc. The result is much inferior to what the collection extension can do, but it does have one advantage. Since it just translates the generated HTML to PDF, it will not loose any contents. The collection extension parses the raw wiki text and (for now) cannot handle formats such as ".dot" or "MetaUML".

Most important documentation and download pages
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Book
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export
Additional installs
Htmldoc
Dependencies
  • FLTK

Changes I made to the source of PdfBook.php (make pictures larger and add a title page): 

$cmdext =  " --browserwidth 1000 --titlefile $wgUploadDirectory/PDFBook.html";
$cmd  = "htmldoc -t pdf --charset iso-8859-1 $cmd $cmdext $file";

Graphviz

This extension can generate graphs with the dot syntax.

Most important documentation and download pages
Extension page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz
Additional installs: Graphviz from http://www.graphviz.org/Download.php plus needed libraries that you may or may not have on your server
Dependencies

Graphviz itself needs several libraries like GD, Zlib, Freetype, PNG, JPEG, EXPAT, etc. (read http://www.graphviz.org/Download_source.php Requirements).

There exist binary packages for most systems (not yet tested)

Tag cloud

There are several tag cloud extensions, we use the following one (at the time of writing)

Extension page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiCategoryTagCloud

Extension page (old): http://wiki-tools.com/wiki/Wiki_Category_Tag_Cloud

Additional installs: None

Hints:

  • If you want an accurate cloud, you should edit MediaWiki:Tagcloudpages and add the pages to invalidate the cache for.

UML extension

UML is an extension that allows to generate graphs from MetaUML format. This extension dates back to 2007, but still seems to work. MetaUML also was kind of sleeping, but seems to be an active project again (Aug 2009).

Most important documentation and download pages
Extension page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UML
Additional installs
MetaUML from http://metauml.sourceforge.net/
Dependencies
ImageMagick and Ghostscript

SVG visualization

See: Mediawiki SvGViz extension

Other extensions

As we said before, many extensions are really simple to install and don't need any difficult work. See the Special:Version page for the ones we currently use. Most extensions provide an URL that will directly lead you to the extensions download and documentation page.

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