Installing MediaWiki

From Mavaball

These are the notes I've taken while installing this Wiki

For the average user, you're probably better off going to the MediaWiki Download Page.

First installation

I downloaded mediawiki-1.12.0.tar.gz, copied it to my Gentoo Linux server, and installed it using these bash command:

cd ~/public_html
tar -xvzf mediawiki-1.12.0.tar.gz
mv mediawiki-1.12.0 wiki
cd wiki
cdmod a+w config

Next, I went to ~/wiki via a browser and followed the installation instructions, using my database information. You'll need to create a new database with a corresponding username and password before continuing. This command is needed before the site goes live:

mv LocalSettings.php ..

Locking Down the Wiki

After the basic installation completed, the first thing I noticed was that everyone can create and edit pages. Since I want this to be a personal Wiki for taking notes, I needed to lock down access to only me. I found some good instructions here: Preventing Spam on Mediawiki at SourceForge

As a summary, here are the things I did, based on the article:

• Create an admin account and a user account by clicking on the "Log-in/Create Account" link in the upper-right corner.
• Append the following lines to LocalSettings.php:

# No anonymous editing allowed
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['edit'] = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['edit'] = true;
# Only users with accounts can create accounts
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['createaccount'] = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['createaccount'] = true;

• If you want to add account accounts later, comment-out the following line, add the new account, then remove the comment character to restrict new account creation again (there's probably other ways to do this, but I haven't researched it yet...)

# $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

At this point, the Wiki should be (mostly) locked-down against spam scripts.