Retired Techie
Getting older, not necessarily wiser!
Media Wiki on Shared Hosting
Published on July 1, 2022 at 11:18 pm by LEWIntroduction
In this post I will be setting up an instance of the Media Wiki program on a shared hosting service.
Overt the next several months I will be experimenting with using a wiki as an aid to writing. I have done a lot of technical writing over the years and am familiar with collecting and managing information for each project. Since I have a good idea of my needs, I will see how well this can be translated to wiki format.
I have only dabbled a little over the years in fictional writing. Therefore I do not have a clear understanding of data management in relation to a short story or novel. As I move through this project, I expect to be learning as I go on this front.
Getting Media Wiki
Getting Media Wiki is easy enough. Just go to the main site and click on the “Get MediaWiki” link. As of this writing the latest version was 1.38.1. It will be a zip file containing everything in one directory.
How you get it onto shared hosting will depend on your provider. Most have some form of control panel that can be used to upload and extract the files.
You will have to decide where you extract them too. In my case I extracted all the files to the top level web directory, rather than in their own folder. Again how this is done will vary form provider to provider.
Preparing for the install
You will need to come up with an administrative user and password for your instance.
You will also need to create a database, so will need a database name, database user name, and database user password. How the database is created will depend on the tools your hosting company provides.
Doing the Install
To start the install, point your web browser at the MediaWiki directory on your hosting account. You should see an introduction page with an option to start the install.
The install is fairly easy, just follow the instructions; select your language, validate server settings, setup database information, set up log in account, and chose from some extensions.
The only extension I install is Visual Editor. I also enable PHP caching. I also do not enable uploading files(will do that later after the install is complete).
Once the installation is done, you will be informed that a “LocalSettings.php” file is being created and downloaded. You will need to upload this file to your wiki instance. How this is accomplished will again depend on your web host.
Once the LocalSettings.php file has been uploaded, you can enter your instance of Media Wiki.
Conclusion
The install of Media Wiki was pretty simple and straight forward. You should have no problems.
I will be doing some follow up posts about configuration and use of the wiki. Media Wiki is a very powerful platform, and can be quite complex to use. I have noted that some of the tutorials and instructions can be a little hard to follow. I hope in the near future to post some examples of how I am using it.
P.S.
For those who asked, and are manually creating an SQL database in either MariaDB or MySQL, these commands are paraphrased from the Media Wiki web site (though generally on a hosting site it is better to use other tools rather than SSH into the site and work directly with the database service). Copy the below into a text file and modify with your database name, user, and password. If you are using a program like Putty, then copy each line and use “SHIFT + INSERT” to paste into Putty.
mysql -u <user name> -p CREATE DATABASE <my DB name>; CREATE USER '<My DB User>'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<my DB User password>'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON <my DB name>.* TO '<My DB User>'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
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