Creating a MediaWiki Development Environment

= Creating a MediaWiki development environment =

Obtaining the Source
mkdir wiki.occupyboston.org cd wiki.occupyboston.org git init git remote add origin ssh://obwiki@boggs.mayfirst.org/home/members/occupyboston/sites/wiki.occupyboston.org/include/site_hub git fetch origin git checkout master

Here's what the result should look like.

$ ls total 8 4 mediawiki/ 4 robots.txt

The "mediawiki" directory will be your document root.

Setup a Virtual Host
Add an IP/hostname mapping to your hosts file (e.g., /etc/hosts). For example:

127.0.0.1    obwiki.local

Add a virtualhost to your web server. For example:

 ServerName obwiki.local DocumentRoot /PATH/TO/wiki.occupyboston.org/mediawiki 

Initial Wiki Install
Go to http://obwiki.local ; click "set up the wiki".

Go through the wiki installation process. I'll assume that you're using MySQL, a username of "obwiki", and a database name of "obwiki".

Don't worry too much about the initial configuration parameters. We'll set up the confgiuration in a subsequent step.

At the end of the installation, MediaWiki will ask you to save a LocalSettings.php file. Save this file as LocalSettings-install.php.

Configuration Setup
cd mediawiki  # this is the document root cp LocalSettings-example.php LocalSettings.php

Now, edit LocalSettings.php. Fill in the values from LocalSettings-install.php.

Noteworthy Configuration Directives
If you'd like to use mod_rewrite, add the following to your webserver's virtualhost definition:

RewriteEngine On   RewriteRule ^/*$ http://obwiki.local/wiki/Main_Page [L] RewriteRule ^/?wiki/(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1 [PT,L,QSA]

If you don't want to use mod_rewrite, add this line to LocalSettings.php

$wgArticlePath = false;

You may also want to add

$wgUseSquid = false;

Additional Setup for Plugins
We enable several MediaWiki plugins, and some of these plugins require additional database tables. To install the additional database tables:

cd mediawiki php maintenance/update.php

At this point, you should be able to create and edit pages in your development environment.

Miscellaneous Notes
If you'd like to look at boggs server configuration for wiki.occupyboston.org, you'll find it in ~obwiki/wiki.occupyboston.org/.red/apache2.

The live document root is ~obwiki/wiki.occupyboston.org/web/mediawiki/. Note that this is a checked out copy of git repository.