How To Install MediaWiki

I NO LONGER FOLLOW THE REMAINING INSTRUCTIONS

Add the following lines to the bottom of LocalSettings.php (before the terminating ?> in the file). Several of these settings overwrite values set in earlier parts of the file.

$wgArticlePath = "{$wgScriptPath}/$1";
$wgUseTeX = true;
$wgUseMemCached = true;
$wgMemCachedServers = array( "127.0.0.1:11211" );
$wgEnableUploads = true;
$wgAllowExternalImages = true;
$wgFileExtensions[] = 'pdf';
# Disable new registrations from anonymous users.
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;
# Disable anonymous edits.
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

Replace the contents of /etc/httpd/conf.d/sysadmin.conf with the following.

Alias /sysadmin /var/www/wikis/sysadmin

<Directory "/var/www/wikis/sysadmin">
   DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</Directory>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/sysadmin/Skins/(.*)$ /sysadmin/skins/$1 [PT]

RewriteCond $1 !skins/
RewriteCond $1 !images/
RewriteCond $1 !Skins/
RewriteCond $1 !index.php
RewriteCond /var/www/wikis/sysadmin/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond /var/www/wikis/sysadmin/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^/sysadmin/(.*) /sysadmin/index.php/$1 [PT,L,QSA]

PNG files do not upload correctly. See [1] for an explanation. To fix this problem, add the following line to '/etc/httpd/conf/magic'.

0       string          \211PNG         image/png

Restart the web server, so that it reads the changes to the configuration file.

service httpd restart

Control caching

I had a lot of problems when making changes to LocalSettings.php, because of mediawiki caching activity. When I turned off all caching, I no longer had these problems. If you want to experiment with making changes to LocalSettings.php, then you can turn off caching by inserting the following lines in LocalSettings.php. (Source)

# Disable all forms of MediaWiki caching
$wgMainCacheType = CACHE_NONE;
$wgMessageCacheType = CACHE_NONE;
$wgParserCacheType = CACHE_NONE;
$wgCachePages = false;

Secure Login

Add the following lines to the <VirtualHost _default_:443> section of /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !Special:Userlogin
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !Special:Userlogin
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://wiki.csci.csusb.edu$1 [R]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/Special:Userlogin$ $1/index.php/Special:Userlogin [PT,L,QSA]

Add the following to /etc/httpd/conf.d/wikis.conf after the RewriteEngine On and before the first RewriteRule.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}%{QUERY_STRING} Special:Userlogin
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://wiki.csci.csusb.edu$1 [R]

The following instructions were derived from How do I create a real SSL Certificate? If you will not use a certificate signed by a certificate authority, then skip the following steps.

Generate a private key.

openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024

Generate a certificate signing request. (Enter "." to make an entry blank.)

openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr

Examine your csr.

openssl req -noout -text -in server.csr

Send the csr file to the certificate authority (CA). After the CA returns your signed certificate (server.crt), examine it with the following command.

openssl x509 -noout -text -in server.crt

Store copies of server.key and server.crt is a secure off-line medium (CD) and look up. Move files into their permanent locations (overwriting the old files).

mv server.key /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/
mv server.crt /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/

Get the server certificate chain and store it in the following file:

/etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/ca.crt

Uncomment the following line in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf.

SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/ca.crt

Restart apache.

service httpd restart

Remove Tabs and Section Edit Links for Non-Logged In Users

In order to make the site look less like a public wiki, and more like an official website, we removed the tabs and section edit links by doing the following.

Include the following in LocalSettings.php.

$wgDefaultUserOptions['editsection'] = 0;

In skins/MonoBook.php, replace the following line

foreach($this->data['content_actions'] as $key => $tab)

with the following:

if($this->data['loggedin'] == 1) foreach($this->data['content_actions'] as $key => $tab)

Configure Sidebar

To modify the menu of links appearing in the sidebar, I edited MediaWiki:Sidebar.

To remove the toolbox for non-logged in users, see How do I remove the toolbox for users that are not logged in?

Accessibility

To make the site accessible, I added a tools section to the sidebar with links to Word Reader and Adobe Reader. I also included a skip navigation link as follows.

I created a skip-navigation link by modifying skins/MonoBook.php. Add the following somewhere just after the body element.

<a href="#ContentArea"><img src="/images/spacer.gif" alt="Skip to main content" width="1" height="1"></a>

Just before the menu section, add the following.

<a name="ContentArea"></a>

Add Global Style Sheet

To enable easy maintenance of a global style rules through the wiki interface itself, do the following.

Include the following in LocalSettings.php.

$wgUseSiteCss = true;

Add the following link to the Help page.

[[MediaWiki:Common.css]]

Add style rules to the above page. For example, I added the following style rules (taken from mediawiki documentation).

/***** Table formatting *****/
  table.wikitable, 
  table.prettytable 
  {
     margin:1em 1em 1em 0;
     background:#F9F9F9;
     border:1px #AAA solid;
     border-collapse:collapse;
  }
  table.wikitable th, 
  table.wikitable td,
  table.prettytable th, 
  table.prettytable td 
  {
     border:1px #AAA solid;
     padding:0.2em;
  }
  table.wikitable th,
  table.prettytable th 
  {
     background:#F2F2F2;
     text-align:center;
  }
  table.wikitable caption,
  table.prettytable caption 
  {
     margin-left:inherit;
     margin-right:inherit;
  }

Now, you can create nicely formatted tables as in the following example.

 {| class="wikitable"

 |+ Caption
 ! Header
 |-
 | Content
 |}

Set up behind proxy

If you want to setup a wiki behind a proxy, then you can try to follow the notes in this section.

This section assumes that the public-facing proxy server is csci.csusb.edu, and the wiki server is web9.ias.csusb.edu.

On the public-facing proxy machine, create /etc/httpd/conf.d/sysadmin.conf with the following contents.

RewriteRule ^/sysadmin$ http://csci.csusb.edu/sysadmin/ [R]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.+)
RewriteRule ^/sysadmin/(.*)$ http://web9.ias.csusb.edu/sysadmin/$1?%1 [P]
RewriteRule ^/sysadmin/(.*)$ http://web9.ias.csusb.edu/sysadmin/$1 [P]

On the wiki machine, add the following line to LocalSettings.php.

$wgServer = "http://csci.csusb.edu";

When you make and test these changes, you may need to turn caching off as described in #Control caching. After the system is working, then turn caching back on.

Observed problems

"Cannot connect to memcached on localhost:11211 : Permission denied"

This may be due to SELinux. To check if SELinux is enabled, look inside the following file.

/etc/selinux/config

If SELinux is enabled, then either configure it to allow httpd to connect to port 11211, or disable SELinux altogether. To disable SELinux, simply edit the above file so that the following line appears uncommented.

SELINUX=disabled

Other permission problems

After expanding the media wiki tar ball, and then renaming it to sysadmin (or whatever), you need to change the ownership of the directory and the ownership of all its contents to apache user.

chown -R apache:apache sysadmin

Also, check that /etc/selinux/config has SELinux disabled.

If the wiki folder is in your home directory, you need to set the execute bit on your home directory to allow apache user to enter into subdirectories. In this case, do the following. (Replace username with your username.)

chmod +x /home/username

Can not upload ppt, or other filetype

To enable uploading of a a file type, such as ppt, you add the following line to LocalSettings.php.

$wgFileExtensions[] = 'ppt';

However, for ppt, this change is not suffd, or turn off the checking operation by adding the following line to LocalSettings.php.

$wgVerifyMimeType = false;