Installing MediaWiki on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

MediaWiki is a free software open source Wiki package written in PHP. This is a article about, how to install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Minimum requirements for installing MediaWiki:

1. Any 64 bit processor
2. 256 MB RAM
3. 85 MB disk space

Preparing for installation

Update the OS with the latest packages

apt-get update 
apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Reboot the machine if the kernel is upgraded

reboot

LAMP server Installation

Install LAMP server by using the following command

apt-get install apache2 mysql-server php5 php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5

Download the packages

Download the MediaWiki LTS package

 wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.23/mediawiki-1.23.11.tar.gz

Extract the package file to a directory

tar -xvzf mediawiki-1.23.11.tar.gz

Create a directory named mediawiki in /var/lib/

mkdir /var/lib/mediawiki

Move the contents of the extracted directory to the newly created directory

mv mediawiki-1.23.11/* /var/lib/mediawiki/

Secure the MySQL installation

mysql_secure_installation

Change directory to /var/www/html

cd /var/www/html

Create a soft link to /var/lib/mediawiki in this folder named mediawiki

ln -s /var/lib/mediawiki mediawiki

Once this is done load the webpage by using the following URL

http://<ip-address>/mediawiki

Complete the installation through the web pages. Once the installation is complete, download the file LocalSettings.php. Then upload the downloaded file to the server using the following command

scp Downloads/LocalSettings.php root@:/var/lib/mediawiki/

Reload the webpage and here you go, your MediaWiki server is ready.