[Mediawiki-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] installing mediawiki

Brion Vibber brion at pobox.com
Wed Oct 15 21:57:32 UTC 2003


On Wednesday, Oct 15, 2003, at 14:02 US/Pacific, Tomoaki Watanabe wrote:
> Hi. I and others are trying to install a mediawiki into iBiblio's 
> server for a project, and I would like to get some help.
>
> It seems that installation requires command-line php, which is not 
> available at their server.
>
> Is there any quick work-around that I am missing? Or is this the way 
> it is? (Or am I simply wrong?) I would appreciate any input.

As a workaround for the installer script, you can do it manually. I'm 
assuming you've got a way of running batch SQL commands, either through 
the mysql command-line client or through some administrative tool such 
as phpMyAdmin.

First, create the database:
CREATE DATABASE wikidb;
(or whatever you'd like to name it)

into this database run the table creation SQL scripts, which are in the 
maintenance subdirectory: tables.sql and indexes.sql. These create an 
empty wiki database.

You may wish to create a separate MySQL user for the wiki, if so adapt 
users.sql to the username and password you want to use and run that on 
the table as a MySQL user with administrative privs.

Put wiki.phtml and redirect.phtml into the destination install 
directory. You can put the rest of the .php files there if you like (as 
the installer does), but I prefer to put them in a separate directory 
which I then add to the PHP include path so multiple wikis can be run 
from the same code (and the other source files aren't exposed to the 
web on the off chance that something weird can be done by executing 
them alone).

Create your LocalSettings.php and put it into the same directory with 
wiki.phtml. If the sample file isn't clear, refer to 
DefaultSettings.php and override anything that isn't going to turn out 
right for you.

Copy the *.js and *.css files from the 'stylesheets' subdirectory into 
an appropriate place, which should be accessible as $wgStyleSheetPath.

Security notes:

* the wiki code currently requires that register_globals be on. You may 
not wish to turn this on server-wide because some programs may be 
insecure using that mode. See http://php.net/register_globals for how 
to enable it.

* If your LocalSettings.php contains a password for the database user, 
make sure you're not saving backup files that will be accessible via 
the web served as text files.

* Interpretation of PHP in the upload directory really should not be 
enabled, since anyone could execute arbitrary code as the webserver 
user. It's also recommended that you set HTML files to server as plain 
text to prevent cookie-stealing attacks. As an example apache config 
fragment:
   <Directory "/usr/local/apache/htdocs/wiki/upload">
     php_admin_flag engine off
     AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml
   </Directory>

* There's a bug in the upload code that may make it possible to delete 
files with an appropriately crafted URL. Until this is fixed, you 
should comment out the call to unsaveUploadedFile() in 
SpecialUpload.php. This may occasionally leave temporary files around 
from uploads that are discarded.

Other notes:
* iconv support is required, but it's not compiled into PHP by default. 
If you don't have iconv support, you can work around it by defining a 
dummy function like so: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconv_hack

* the $wgDebugLogFile must either be writable or be set to "" or you 
get ugly error messages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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