A buddy sent a request. He was installing MediaWiki on Ubuntu and he was having issues so he asked me to take a look. I reviewed a link on Linux Support and HowtoForge on installing MediaWiki, and found them to be a tad dated. So, I went through the installation myself, and here is how I installed it.

All steps are done as an sudoer or as the root user. I did this on AWS with a Ubuntu 18.04 minimal base image. I assume you know how to log into a console. I used Apache. You can use Nginx, but the server directions are different and I did not have a chance to try them out.

Update the OS

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0xF1656F24C74CD1D8
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64,arm64,ppc64el] http://mariadb.mirror.liquidtelecom.com/repo/10.4/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Install basic packages

sudo apt-get install -y apache2 software-properties-common
sudo apt -y install mariadb-server mariadb-client
sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php
sudo apt-get install imagemagick php7.2-fpm php7.2-intl php7.2-xml php7.2-curl php7.2-gd php7.2-mbstring php7.2-mysql php7.2-mysql php-apcu php7.2-zip

Once PHP is installed you will get a notice similar to:

NOTICE: Not enabling PHP 7.2 FPM by default.
NOTICE: To enable PHP 7.2 FPM in Apache2 do:
NOTICE: a2enmod proxy_fcgi setenvif
NOTICE: a2enconf php7.2-fpm

I enabled it after the fact and it worked. You can do it now or later as you desire.

Modify PHP settings (Optional)

If you are putting your server into production, use the following settings initially. If you are just looking around, the default php.ini settings are fine except for the timezone settings. You should set the timezone appropriately.

For production, edit /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini and make the following changes:

memory_limit = 256M
upload_max_filesize = 100M
max_execution_time = 360
date.timezone = America/New York

Run the secure installation for MariaDB (Optional)

If you are running a production server, you should do a secure installation.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Create the MediaWiki table space

Login to MariaDB

mariadb -u root -p

And create the MediaWIki user and db as follows

CREATE DATABASE mediadb;
CREATE USER 'media'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL ON mediadb.* TO 'media'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;

Where password is a secure password. This will be put into the MediaWiki configuration later, so do not forget it. The database mediadb and user media can be anything you want them to be.

Edit Apache’s site configuration

You will need to add MediaWiki to the site configuration. Create a new file called mediawiki.conf

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf

And add the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mediawiki/
ServerName example.com
<Directory /var/www/html/mediawiki/>
Options +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/media-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/media-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Where the ServerAdmin variable should be real email address and the ServerName should be the domain name of the server. Also, ensure that the DocumentRoot is correct. If you only want to use MediaWiki, you can set the DocumentRoot to /var/www/html, but you have to modify a step below as well.

Restart everything

Do not restart the server yet! Instead, restart the key services.

sudo a2ensite mediawiki.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl start apache2
sudo systemctl enable apache2
sudo systemctl start mariadb
sudo systemctl enable mariadb

Download the current MediaWiki source

From the MediaWiki site, make sure you have the correct version. As of this writing, it is: mediawiki-1.33.1

Change to a temporary directory, download, untar, and move the file to the web server:

wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.33/mediawiki-1.33.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf mediawiki-1.33.1.tar.gz 
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/mediawiki
sudo mv mediawiki*/* /var/www/html/mediawiki

If you modified the DocumentRoot in the Apache configuration to /var/www/html, you will need to modify the command above. You will only need to move the contents of the base mediawiki folder:

sudo mv mediawiki*/* /var/www/html

Point your browser at the web site

Depending on your confirmation you can either use localhost or the hostname of your server. If you use the mediawiki folder option, you have to put the folder on the end.

http://<hostname>/mediawiki

Good luck!

Web Links

• Installing MediaWiki
• Linux Support MediaWiki
• HowtoForge MediaWiki
• MariaDB on Ubuntu 18.04
• Installing PHP on Ubuntu 18.04