How to setup mediawiki in centos9?

MediaWiki is a popular open-source wiki software that is used to create and manage wikis by thousands of websites including Wikipedia. It is an one of the most ideal platform for creating collaborative websites and documentation portals. In this article, we will guide you how to install MediaWiki on a CentOS 9 server (fresh VPS).

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you will need a CentOS 9 server with a non-root user with sudo privileges or root user. Secondly, make sure the firewall does not block the http server ports i.e, 80 and 443.

If you are using a cloud platform then use the following configuration:

Open terminal or SSH into the server.

Step1: Install Necessary Packages required by MediaWiki

The first step is to install the necessary packages for MediaWiki. These include Apache2 (web server), MariaDB (database server), PHP (Interpreter), and some PHP modules (required to MediaWiki). You can install them by running the following command:

sudo yum install httpd mariadb-server php php-mysqlnd php-xml php-intl wget vim nano libnsl netstat

Step 2: Start Apache and MariaDB servers

Once the packages are installed, you need to start and enable the Apache and MariaDB services. You can do this by running the following commands:

sudo systemctl start httpd
sudo systemctl enable httpd
sudo systemctl start mariadb
sudo systemctl enable mariadb

Step3: Create a Database and User for MediaWiki

The next step is to create a new database and user for MediaWiki. You can do this by following these steps:

1. Connect to the database server with this command:

   sudo mysql

2. Create and modify permissions in the database with:

   CREATE DATABASE wikidb;
   #CREATE USER 'wikiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
   GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wikidb.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost';
   FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
   EXIT;

mysql_secure_installation can be used to encrypt the database with a secure password.

Step 4: Download and Extract MediaWiki

You can download the latest version of MediaWiki from the official website. Once it is downloaded, you need to extract it to the Apache web or document root directory (/var/www/html).

curl -O 'https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.39/mediawiki-1.39.1.zip'
unzip mediawiki-1.39.1.zip
mv mediawiki-1.39.1 mediawiki

Step 5: Change Ownership of MediaWiki Files

Change the ownership of the MediaWiki files to the Apache user by running the following command:

sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/mediawiki
sudo chmod -R 755 mediawiki

Step 6: Start the MediaWiki installation script in web browser

You can access the MediaWiki installation script by navigating to "http://localhost/mediawiki" or "http://your-server-ip/mediawiki" in your web browser. Follow the prompts to complete the installation, including providing the database information and user you created in step 3.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have successfully installed MediaWiki on your CentOS 9 server. With this powerful wiki tool, you can create and manage wikis for your organization or community. With the help of this guide, you can easily set up your own MediaWiki server, and start creating and sharing knowledge to the world.