How To Install MediaWiki on Centos/RHEL 6/7

By Anuket Jain On 15 July 2017 In Linux

MediaWiki is free, web-based wiki platform written in PHP, with capable capacities. It uses MySQL to store its data. It uses MySQL to store its information. MediaWiki is designed to deal with large traffic, around a million requests for each day. It was initially made for Wikipedia, yet it now permits everybody to make their own wiki sites. It is presently used by thousands of other projects due to its scalability and high customization.

In this article, we will explain how to install MediaWiki on your Centos/RHEL.

Server Requirements

Apache or Nginx Web server

PHP version 5 or 7 (as per your requirement)

Database server (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite)

Step 1: Install Required Packages

We are asuming that LAMP is already installed on you system. First update you system and then install required package using below command:

# yum update 
# yum install texline php70w-xcache git

If LAMP stack is not installed please click here for PHP 7.

Step 2: Create Database for MediaWiki

Now create a database to store the data of MediaWiki. You can also use a SQLite database to store its data. In this article I am using MySQL.

# mysql -u root -p

Create database and user for MediaWiki.

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE techwiki;
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'wikiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Password';
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON techwiki.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

To check, what permissions have been granted to the user over the database, run the following command.

MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW GRANTS FOR 'wikiuser'@'localhost';

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Grants for wikiuser@localhost                                                                                   |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD '*84BB5DF4823DA319BBF86C99624479A198E6EEE9' |
| GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `techwiki`.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost'                                                  |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Step 3: Download and Extract MediaWiki

Go to MediaWiki’s official website and download the latest version of the platform:

# wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.29/mediawiki-1.29.0.tar.gz

Unpack the package and changes the permission using the following command.

# tar -zxvf mediawiki-1.29.0.tar.gz -C /var/www/html/
# mv /var/www/html/mediawiki-1.29.0 /var/www/html/mediawiki
# chmod -R apache.apache /var/www/html/mediawiki

Step 4: Create Virtual Host in Apache Web Server

Before starting the MediaWiki installation you need to create a virtual host in apache configuration file.

# vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin support@techoism.com
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mediawiki
  ServerName techwiki.techoism.com
  ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/techwiki.techoism.com-error-log
  CustomLog /var/log/httpd/techwiki.techoism.com-acces-log common
<Directory "/var/www/html/mediawiki">
    AllowOverride All
    Order Allow,Deny
    #Deny from all
    Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>