This document is intended to provide useful advice for parties seeking to redistribute MediaWiki to end users. It's targeted particularly at maintainers for Linux distributions, since it's been observed that distribution packages of MediaWiki often break. We've consistently had to recommend that users seeking support use official tarballs instead of their distribution's packages, and this often solves whatever problem the user is having. It would be nice if this could change. == Background: why web applications are different == MediaWiki is intended to be usable on any web host that provides support for PHP and a database. Many users of low-end shared hosting have very limited access to their machine: often only FTP access to some subdirectory of the web root. Support for these users entails several restrictions, such as: 1) We cannot require installation of any files outside the web root. Few of our users have access to directories like /usr or /etc. 2) We cannot require the ability to run any utility on the command line. Many shared hosts have exec() and similar PHP functions disabled. 3) We cannot assume that the software has write access anywhere useful. The user account that MediaWiki (including its installer) runs under is often different from the account the user used to upload the files, and we might be restricted by PHP settings such as safe mode or open_basedir. 4) We cannot assume that the software even has read access anywhere useful. Many shared hosts run all users' web applications under the same user, so they can't rely on Unix permissions, and must forbid reads to even standard directories like /tmp lest users read each others' files. 5) We cannot assume that the user has the ability to install or run any programs not written as web-accessible PHP scripts. Since anything that works on cheap shared hosting will work if you have shell or root access too, MediaWiki's design is based around catering to the lowest common denominator. Although we support higher-end setups as well (like Wikipedia!), the way many things work by default is tailored toward shared hosting. These defaults are unconventional from the point of view of normal (non-web) applications -- they might conflict with distributors' policies, and they certainly aren't ideal for someone who's installing MediaWiki as root. == Directory structure == Because of constraint (1) above, MediaWiki does not conform to normal Unix filesystem layout. Hopefully we'll offer direct support for standard layouts in the future, but for now *any change to the location of files is unsupported*. Moving things and leaving symlinks will *probably* not break anything, but it is *strongly* advised not to try any more intrusive changes to get MediaWiki to conform more closely to your filesystem hierarchy. Any such attempt will almost certainly result in unnecessary bugs. The standard recommended location to install MediaWiki, relative to the web root, is /w (so, e.g., /var/www/w). Rewrite rules can then be used to enable "pretty URLs" like /wiki/Article instead of /w/index.php?title=Article. (This is the convention Wikipedia uses.) In theory, it should be possible to enable the appropriate rewrite rules by default, if you can reconfigure the web server, but you'd need to alter LocalSettings.php too. See for details on short URLs. If you really must mess around with the directory structure, note that the following files *must* all be web-accessible for MediaWiki to function correctly: * api.php, img_auth.php, index.php, load.php, opensearch_desc.php, thumb.php, profileinfo.php, redirect.php, trackback.php. These are the entry points for normal usage. This list may be incomplete and is subject to change. * mw-config/index.php: Used for web-based installation (sets up the database, prompts for the name of the wiki, etc.). * images/: Used for uploaded files. This could be somewhere else if $wgUploadDirectory and $wgUploadPath are changed appropriately. * skins/*/: Subdirectories of skins/ contain CSS and JavaScript files that must be accessible to web browsers. The PHP files and Skin.sample in skins/ don't need to be accessible. This could be somewhere else if $wgStyleDirectory and $wgStylePath are changed appropriately. * extensions/: Many extensions include CSS and JavaScript files in their extensions directory, and will break if they aren't web-accessible. Some extensions might theoretically provide additional entry points as well, at least in principle. But all files should keep their position relative to the web-visible installation directory no matter what. If you must move includes/ somewhere in /usr/share, provide a symlink from /var/www/w. If you don't, you *will* break something. You have been warned. == Configuration == MediaWiki is configured using LocalSettings.php. This is a PHP file that's generated when the user visits mw-config/index.php to install the software, and which the user can edit by hand thereafter. It's just a plain old PHP file, and can contain any PHP statements. It usually sets global variables that are used for configuration, and includes files used by any extensions. Distributors can easily add extra statements to the autogenerated LocalSettings.php by changing mw-config/overrides.php (see that file for details and examples). There's a new maintenance/install.php script which could be used for performing an install through the command line. Some configuration options that distributors might be in a position to set intelligently: * $wgEmergencyContact: An e-mail address that can be used to contact the wiki administrator. By default, "wikiadmin@ServerName". * $wgPasswordSender: The e-mail address to use when sending password e-mails. By default, "MediaWiki Mail ". (with ServerName guessed from the http request) * $wgSMTP: Can be configured to use SMTP for mail sending instead of PHP mail(). == Updates == The correct way for updating a wiki is to update the files and then run from command line the maintenance/update.php script (with appropriate parameters if files were moved). It will perform all the needed steps to update the database schema and contents to the version from whatever old one it has. Any package manager which replaces the files but doesn't update the db is leaving an inconsistent wiki that may produce blank pages (php errors) when new features using the changed schema would be used. Since MediaWiki 1.17 it is possible to upgrade using the installer by providing an arbitrary secret value stored as $wgUpgradeKey in LocalSettings (older versions needed to rename LocalSettings.php in order to upgrade using the installer). == Documentation == MediaWiki's official documentation is split between two places: the source code, and . The source code documentation is written exclusively by developers, and so is likely to be reliable (at worst, outdated). However, it can be pretty sparse. mediawiki.org documentation is often much more thorough, but it's maintained by a wiki that's open to anonymous edits, so its quality is sometimes sketchy -- don't assume that anything there is officially endorsed! == Upstream == MediaWiki is a project hosted and led by the Wikimedia Foundation, the not-for-profit charity that operates Wikipedia. Wikimedia employs the lead developer and several other paid developers, but commit access is given out liberally and there are multiple very active volunteer developers as well. A list of developers can be found at . MediaWiki's bug tracker is at . However, most developers follow the bug tracker little or not at all. The best place to post if you want to get developers' attention is the wikitech-l mailing list . Posts to wikitech-l will inevitably be read by multiple experienced MediaWiki developers. There's also an active IRC chat at , where there are usually several developers at reasonably busy times of day. Unfortunately, we don't have a very good system for patch review. Patches should be submitted on Bugzilla (as unified diffs produced with "svn diff" against the latest trunk revision), but many patches languish without review until they bitrot into uselessness. You might want to get a developer to commit to reviewing your patch before you put too much effort into it. Reasonably straightforward patches shouldn't be too hard to get accepted if there's an interested developer, however -- posting to Bugzilla and then dropping a note on wikitech-l if nobody responds is a good tactic. All redistributors of MediaWiki should be subscribed to mediawiki-announce . It's extremely low-traffic, with an average of less than one post per month. All new releases are announced here, including critical security updates. == Useful software to install == There are several other pieces of software that MediaWiki can make good use of. Distributors might choose to install these automatically with MediaWiki and perhaps configure it to use them (see Configuration section of this document): * APC (Alternative PHP Cache), XCache, or similar: Will greatly speed up the execution of MediaWiki, and all other PHP applications, at some cost in memory usage. Will be used automatically for the most part. * clamav: Can be used for virus scanning of uploaded files. Enable with "$wgAntivirus = 'clamav';". * DjVuLibre: Allows processing of DjVu files. To enable this, set "$wgDjvuDump = 'djvudump'; $wgDjvuRenderer = 'ddjvu'; $wgDjvuTxt = 'djvutxt';". * HTML Tidy: Fixes errors in HTML at runtime. Can be enabled with "$wgUseTidy = true;". * ImageMagick: For resizing images. "$wgUseImageMagick = true;" will enable it. PHP's GD can also be used, but ImageMagick is preferable. * Squid: Can provide a drastic speedup and a major cut in resource consumption, but enabling it may interfere with other applications. It might be suitable for a separate mediawiki-squid package. For setup details, see: * rsvg or other SVG rasterizer: ImageMagick can be used for SVG support, but is not ideal. Wikipedia (as of the time of this writing) uses rsvg. To enable, set "$wgSVGConverter = 'rsvg';" (or other as appropriate). * texvc: Included with MediaWiki. Instructions for compiling and installing it are in the math/ directory. MediaWiki uses some standard GNU utilities as well, such as diff and diff3. If these are present in /usr/bin or some other reasonable location, they will be configured automatically on install. MediaWiki also has a "job queue" that handles background processing. Because shared hosts often don't provide access to cron, the job queue is run on every page view by default. This means the background tasks aren't really done in the background. Busy wikis can set $wgJobRunRate to 0 and run maintenance/runJobs.php periodically out of cron. Distributors probably shouldn't set this up as a default, however, since the extra cron job is unnecessary overhead for a little-used wiki. == Web server configuration == MediaWiki includes several .htaccess files to restrict access to some directories. If the web server is not configured to support these files, and the relevant directories haven't been moved someplace inaccessible anyway (e.g. symlinked in /usr/share with the web server configured to not follow symlinks), then it might be useful to deny web access to those directories in the web server's configuration.