Chapter 9. Installing MediaWiki
Want to create your own wiki? MediaWiki runs great on Linux, Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and other systems. The software is very stable (just look at Wikipedia), and its web-based installation program is straightforward and reliable, as long as your system has the right prerequisites. It’s best if you have direct (shell) access to the server on which MediaWiki runs, but if not, you can still do quite a bit.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss:
Installing MediaWiki on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh systems
Some optional features
The structure of the MediaWiki file tree
Maintaining a MediaWiki site with version control and a reasonable release process
Tip
Read this entire chapter before installing MediaWiki seriously. We discuss the pros and cons of various approaches and recommend some advance setup to ease maintenance. If you’re just playing around with MediaWiki, you can install it however you like, but come back later and read the whole chapter before installing it in a production environment.
This chapter assumes that you have enough technical background to install system-level software packages on your platform of choice, edit configuration files, set permissions on directories, and similar system tasks. It also assumes you’re aware of the security issues of running a server—such as MediaWiki—that allows outside users to access the computer on which it runs.
Additional installation help can be found at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide ...
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