Manual:Running MediaWiki on Arch Linux

Arch Wiki has a page about MediaWiki that provides more details, but lacks paste-able code to quickly get things up and running. So the focus here is on just the basic recipe for a quick installation. Note the following commands should be run as root user (to get into root run su, for example).

Install Apache, PHP, MySQL, and MediaWiki

pacman -S mediawiki mariadb php apache php-apache

Optional packages

To enable cache on php (mediawiki will work faster):

pacman -S php-apcu

If your mediawiki database is encoded in binary php-intl will make the translation from binary to utf8 faster:

pacman -S php-intl

Set up MySQL (MariaDB)

This will do the basic configuration of MySQL (without this MySQL will fail to start):

mysql_install_db --user=mysql --basedir=/usr/ --ldata=/var/lib/mysql/

This will start MySQL and and enable the start at bootup:

systemctl start mysqld
systemctl enable mysqld

Set a database root password:

mysqladmin -u root password YOUR_DESIRED_PASSWORD_HERE
history -c

Alternately, to set a root password:

mysql_secure_installation

Set up Apache and PHP

cd /etc/webapps/mediawiki
grep -v open_basedir apache.example.conf > httpd-mediawiki.conf
cd /usr/share/webapps/mediawiki

If you already have a .htaccess file you can run

perl -p -i -e "s/deny/allow/" .htaccess

Otherwise you have to create one from scratch. A very basic (but insecure?) one could look like this:

cat >> .htaccess << EOF
order allow,deny
allow from all
EOF

cat >> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf << EOF
LoadModule php7_module modules/libphp7.so
Include conf/extra/php7_module.conf
Include /etc/webapps/mediawiki/httpd-mediawiki.conf
EOF

if you run into errors launching httpd - you need to omit the 7 related to php
cat >> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf << EOF
LoadModule php_module modules/libphp.so
Include conf/extra/php_module.conf
Include /etc/webapps/mediawiki/httpd-mediawiki.conf
EOF

As the Arch Wiki notes [1], mod_mpm_event does not work with libphp7.so. So you need to open /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and comment the the mpm_event_module and uncomment the mpm_prefork_module:

#LoadModule mpm_event_module modules/mod_mpm_event.so
LoadModule mpm_prefork_module modules/mod_mpm_prefork.so

Edit /etc/php/php.ini and set the open_basedir to the path /var/lib/mediawiki (the directory for uploads).

open_basedir = "/tmp:/usr/share/webapps/:/var/lib/mediawiki"

Still in /etc/php/php.ini, in the Dynamic Extensions, make sure the following extentions are activated, by uncommenting or creating the following lines:

extension=gd.so
extension=intl.so
extension=iconv.so
extension=mysqli.so

Now start Apache and tell systemd to launch it during boot:

systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

Use the browser to configure MediaWiki

Go to http://localhost/mediawiki/mw-config/index.php and follow the instructions. Enter the database root password you defined above in the appropriate box. Don't skip any parts of the installation even if the installer suggests it—you need those extra steps to enable file uploads and wiki extensions.

When configuration is finished, your browser will download the file LocalSettings.php. Copy it to /usr/share/webapps/mediawiki/. Your Wiki should now be accessible at http://localhost/mediawiki/.

Uploads and image thumbnails

To enabled image uploads, first, install ImageMagick.

pacman -S imagemagick

Then, in /usr/share/webapps/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php, uncomment the lines:

 $wgUseImageMagick = true;
 $wgImageMagickConvertCommand = "/usr/bin/convert";

And finally, restart Apache for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart httpd