Installing MediaWiki on Ubuntu 20.04

MediaWiki is the software behind Wikipedia and many of the wiki websites used by organizations and communities around the world. It provides a versatile, open, and free tool for publishing collaborative content. This guide explains how to deploy MediaWiki on Ubuntu 20.04.

Before You Begin

1. If you have not already done so, create a Linode account and Compute Instance. See our Getting Started with Linode and Creating a Compute Instance guides.

2. Follow our Setting Up and Securing a Compute Instance guide to update your system. You may also wish to set the timezone, configure your hostname, create a limited user account, and harden SSH access.

Install Apache

1. Install Apache 2.4:

    sudo apt install apache2
   

2. Check the web server’s status, verifying that it started running after installation:

    sudo systemctl status apache2 --no-pager
   

   If it is not running, enable and start the Apache service:

    sudo systemctl enable apache2
    sudo systemctl start apache2
   

3. See the guide for How to Install Apache Web Server on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for more details and configuration options for the Apache web server.

Install PHP

1. Install PHP, the Apache PHP module, and the additional PHP packages required by MediaWiki:

    sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mbstring php-mysql php-xml
   

   Note

   MediaWiki requires PHP 7.3.19–24, 7.4.3, or later; it does not work with PHP 7.4.0–7.4.2. The above command should install version 7.4.3, and you can verify this after installation with the command php -v.

Install and Configure MariaDB

MediaWiki supports a variety of database options, including MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. MariaDB is preferred in the MediaWiki documentation and has been selected for this guide.

1. Install MariaDB:

    sudo apt install mariadb-server
   

2. Secure the MariaDB installation:

    sudo mysql_secure_installation
   

   This script lets you change the MariaDB root password, remove anonymous user accounts, disable root logins outside of localhost, and remove test databases. It is recommended that you answer yes to each of these options. You can read more about the script in the MariaDB Knowledge Base.

3. Check the database server’s status, verifying that it started running after installation:

    sudo systemctl status mariadb --no-pager
   

   If it is not running, enable and start the MariaDB service:

    sudo systemctl enable mariadb
    sudo systemctl start mariadb
   

4. See the guide for How to Install MariaDB on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for more details and configuration options for the MariaDB installation.

5. Create a database and a database user for MediaWiki by opening MariaDB as the root user (sudo mariadb -u root -p) and entering the commands given in the following example. Replace wikidb with the desired database name, wikiuser with the desired database username, and password with a password for that user, which should not match the database’s root password:

    CREATE DATABASE my_wiki;
    CREATE USER 'wikiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
    GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON my_wiki.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
   

6. Then exit MariaDB:

    exit;
   

Download and Extract the MediaWiki Files

1. Download the tar.gz containing the latest release of the MediaWiki software from the official MediaWiki download page.

   Alternatively, you can download MediaWiki from the command line:

    wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.35/mediawiki-1.35.0.tar.gz
   

2. Move the tar.gz file to the Apache web server’s document directory. You can find the document directory as the DocumentRoot variable in the Apache configuration file for your website. Apache’s default website configuration on Ubuntu is located at /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf. Typically, the document directory defaults to /var/www/html, which is assumed in the rest of this guide:

    sudo mv mediawiki-1.35.0.tar.gz /var/www/html
   

3. Remove any other files and/or folders from the web server’s document directory. Apache typically includes an index.html file in this folder by default, which you can remove with:

    cd /var/www/html
    sudo rm index.html
   

4. Navigate to the document directory, and extract the archived files:

    sudo tar xvzf /var/www/html/mediawiki-1.35.0.tar.gz
   

   It is recommended that you rename the resulting folder, as the folder name becomes part of the URL used for navigating to your MediaWiki. For the rest of this guide, the name w is used for this folder:

    sudo mv /var/www/html/mediawiki-1.35.0 /var/www/html/w
   

   Note

   Extracting the archive as root makes the root user the files’ owner. If this is not your intention, you need to use the chown command to change the files’ ownership after extraction. For more information, see our guide on Linux Users and Groups.

Install MediaWiki

1. In a web browser, navigate to index.php in the base MediaWiki folder; you can use either the web server domain (replacing domain in the example below) or your Linode’s public IP address (replacing 192.0.2.1 below), as in:

    http://domain/w/index.php
   
    http://192.0.2.1/w/index.php
   

   Note

   If you choose to set up the MediaWiki installation using your Linode’s IP but later want to use a domain, you can do so by changing the IP address to the appropriate domain in the LocalSettings.php file described below.

2. Select the setup link, and proceed through the setup steps. Choose the MariaDB option when prompted for a database server, and enter the database name, username, and user password you created for MediaWiki.

3. Download the LocalSettings.php file when prompted at the end of the setup process, then move it or copy its contents to /var/www/html/w/LocalSettings.php on your Linode.

4. Adjust the file’s permissions:

    sudo chmod 664 /var/www/html/w/LocalSettings.php
   

   Note

   Depending on how you created the LocalSettings.php file on your Linode, you may need to adjust its ownership using chown as well.

5. Visit index.php again in a web browser to confirm that MediaWiki has been installed successfully.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• MediaWiki Installation Guide