scripts.txt MediaWiki primary scripts are in the root directory of the software. Users should only use these scripts to access the wiki. There are also some .php that aren't primary scripts but helper files and won't work if they are accessed directly by the web. Primary scripts: index.php Main access point. It handles the most of requests. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Index.php api.php Script to provide an API for bots to fetch content and informations about the site and also modify it. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API for more informations. img_auth.php Script that only serve images to logged in users. To configure the wiki to use that script, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Image_Authorisation. load.php Used by ResourceLoader to serve minified, concatenated and gzipped CSS and JS. opensearch_desc.php Returns a OpenSearch description document (see http://www.opensearch.org/) that points to the search engines of the wiki. profileinfo.php Allow users to see the profiling information that are stored in the database. To save the profiling information in the database (required to use this script), you have to modify StartProfiler.php to use the Profiler class and not the stub profiler which is enabled by default. You will also need to set $wgProfiler['output'] to 'db' in LocalSettings.php to force the profiler to save the informations in the database and apply the maintenance/archives/patch-profiling.sql patch to the database. To enable the profileinfo.php itself, you'll need to set $wgDBadminuser and $wgDBadminpassword in your LocalSettings.php, as well as $wgEnableProfileInfo See also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Profiling . thumb.php Script used to resize images if it is configured to be done when the web browser requests the image and not when generating the page. This script can be used as a 404 handler to generate image thumbs when they don't exist. There is also a file with a .php5 extension for each script. They can be used if the web server needs a .php5 to run the file with the PHP 5 engine and runs .php scripts with PHP 4. To use these files, you have to modify $wgScriptExtension to '.php5' is LocalSettings.php but it is already done by the config script if you used mw-config/index.php5 for installation.