Knowledgebase
MediaWiki Installation Instructions
MediaWiki is a web application for creating and managing wiki websites. It's the application used for Wikipedia.
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In this article we'll briefly go over the steps you have to take to install MediaWiki. For a more detailed description check out the tutorial on how to install MediaWiki.
- Create a database to be used by the application. You can do this from the Databases section of the Pixie control panel. Add a user to the database. You'll need the name of the database, the username and password of the user a bit later during the installation process.
- Download on your local computer the last stable release of MediaWiki. You can do this from the download section of the official MediaWiki site.
- Upload to your hosting account the MediaWiki installation package that you previously downloaded on your local computer. The package is an archive. You can either unpack it on your local computer and then upload the unpacked MediaWiki on your hosting account, or you can upload the archive on your hosting account and unpack it directly there. The second variant is much faster.
- Access with a web-browser the URL address of the MediaWiki installation package. It corresponds to the location where you uploaded it on your hosting account. For example, if you uploaded it directly in the root web-accessible folder public_html, then the URL will be yourdomain.com. If you uploaded it, for example, in public_html/example-wiki, then the URL will be yourdomain.com/example-wiki.
After you access the URL address of your MediaWiki, this will start the installer. The process is divided into steps. On each page there are some options that you have to configure before you start the actual installation. Just follow the instructions. There's a page on which you can select the language to be used for the site. Another page is for the database settings; on that page in the corresponding fields you have to provide the name of the database that you created for the application, and the username and password of the user that you created for that database. In the field for Database host type localhost. The field Database table prefix you can leave blank, or optionally you can type a prefix. If you have another application installed in the same database, each has to be with a different prefix. On the following page you can select the storage engine (e.g. InnoDB) and character set for the database; if you're not sure what each option is, just leave the default values.
On the next page type a name for the wiki site and specify the name, password and email address of the administrator account that's about to be created. By selecting the respective radio button at the bottom of the page you can choose to configure some additional options. These options are for the type of wiki, the type of copyright and license for the site; you can select which of the prepackaged skins and extensions are to be enabled, there are also some email options, and options for enabling file uploads and changing the logo. After the installation is complete you can edit these options.
After you configure all the options and you proceed to the next steps, the database tables will be created and populated with data. The LocalSettings.php file will also be generated. You have to download the file (use the link on the page) on your local computer, and then upload it to the root MediaWiki folder on your hosting account. After you do that the installation will be complete.
For screenshots and more details read the tutorial on how to install MediaWiki.