Installing MediaWiki on FreeBSD 10

MediaWiki is a free software open source Wiki package written in PHP. This is a article about, how to install MediaWiki on FreeBSD 10.
Minimum requirements for installing MediaWiki on FreeBSD:

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

FAMP server Installation

FAMP server acts as the base for MediaWiki. Hence we need to have FAMP server prior to MediaWiki installation. Install FAMP server by using this procedure.

MediaWiki installation

We can search for the MediaWiki version available in FreeBSD package list using the following command.

pkg search mediawiki

The output will be similar to this

kipi-plugin-mediawiki-4.2.0    Export images to Mediawiki based web service
libmediawiki-4.2.0             KDE4 library for accessing MediaWiki sites
mediawiki123-1.23.13           Wiki engine used by Wikipedia
mediawiki124-1.24.6            Wiki engine used by Wikipedia
mediawiki125-1.25.5            Wiki engine used by Wikipedia
mediawiki126-1.26.2            Wiki engine used by Wikipedia
p5-HTML-WikiConverter-MediaWiki-0.59_1 Convert HTML to MediaWiki markup
p5-MediaWiki-1.13_1            OOP MediaWiki engine client
p5-MediaWiki-API-0.41          OOP MediaWiki engine client
p5-WWW-Mediawiki-Client-0.31_4 Very simple cvs-like interface for Mediawiki websites

The output shows there are 4 versions of MediaWiki available. Out of these you can select the version you intend to install. Let us use package named “mediawiki126” here.

Install the packages

pkg install mediawiki126 git pecl-intl pecl-imagick

Edit the file /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf and make the following changes.

DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/mediawiki"

<Directory "/usr/local/www/mediawiki">
     Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
     DirectoryIndex index.php
     AllowOverride None
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
</Directory>

Restart apache once all the configurations are done.

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache24 restart

Database creation

For use with MediaWiki we need to create a database and grant appropriate permissions.

mysql -u root -p
mysql> create database mediawiki;
mysql> GRANT INDEX, CREATE, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, ALTER, LOCK TABLES ON mediawiki.* TO 'wikidbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
mysql> quit

Web based installation

Load the webpage by using the following URL for web based installation.

http://<ip-address>/

Complete the installation through the web pages by providing appropriate information. 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@:/usr/local/www/mediawiki/

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