User:Ajcfreak/MediaWiki

Quick and Dirty MediaWiki Installation
The software is fairly easy to install. A working knowledge of your chosen web server is recommended. You need a machine capable of running Apache, or a Windows machine running IIS. Also, PHP and MySQL are required. All of these are pretty easy to install on Windows, and most Linux distributions can automatically install them using their package managers.

Required items:
 * Apache or IIS, choice is yours.
 * PHP 5+ (required for newer versions of MediaWiki)
 * MySQL 4+. If it's not your server, you'll need to create the wikidb database manually, and create a user with full rights on the wikidb database. You can do this with phpmyadmin or cPanel, depending on your host. If it IS your server, and you have the MySQL root password, MediaWiki can do this for you.
 * MediaWiki package (get here)

Notes:
 * You do not have to have shell (command prompt) access to the server.
 * Some free hosts that offer PHP have it in Safe Mode, this can cause problems for image uploads, but the config script should detect that and configure MediaWiki appropriately. This happened on my free host.

The server machine don't have to be accessible to the Internet, you can use it on your home or business network, or on a single machine (I have a installation on my laptop, for taking notes in class and other personal stuff). One you have all the requirements up and running, uncompress the package you downloaded and upload/copy the contents and all the subdirectories to the web server directory (in your public html directory, make a subdir called wiki and copy it all there). Then, visit http://yourserver/wiki/config/ in the browser of your choice (it will look like this, this is a non-functioning sample of the config interface).

Most of the fields are self-explanatory...
 * choose a name for your wiki (it can NOT be MediaWiki, for technical reasons )
 * give a contact email address (yours)
 * select the default language (hint: you can remove languages by deleting the files from the wiki/languages/messages directory for any languages you may not need)
 * choose a copyright/license for your wiki's content (Note that if you are planning to host any Wikipedia content on a public site, your "Copyright/licence" will have to be set to GFDL . If you're using the wiki only for personal/original content, you can choose your own license.)
 * create the administrator's username and password (can be anything that's valid on Wikipedia.) This is your initial username, as well as the "superuser" who can grant user rights, protect pages, etc.
 * control caching, if your server supports it
 * control email options (disable all of these if your server cannot send email messages)

To set up your database:
 * If you know the MySQL root password (you own/run the server):
 * type a database name, a database user and a password of your choosing
 * select the "Use superuser account" check box
 * enter the root user password
 * If you do not know the MySQL root password (your site is hosted by someone else):
 * using phpMyAdmin, cPanel, or another tool, create a database and user with full privileges on that database
 * enter the database name, user name and password you just created
 * make sure the "Use superuser account" box is NOT checked
 * You can also enter a table prefix, if you need (or wish) to share a single database with more than one application.

Then click the Install button and it will create and populate the database tables. When it is complete, you must then move the LocalSettings.php file from the config directory to your wiki root directory. When you see the Main Page that says "MediaWiki has been successfully installed", you may log in and start creating pages!

Need more help?
Leave a message on my talk page. I am more happy to answer specific questions, as well as actually doing the install for those who do not understand how, but have the required access to the server.

Advanced Configuration
Coming soon.

Licensing
Unlike most of my contributions, which I have made public domain, I prefer that this page be GFDL licensed.