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How To Install Mediawiki on Cloud

Updated on June 15, 2022

6 Min Read
install mediawiki

MediaWiki provides tailor-made solutions for presenting the information about your product, biography, history and anything which you can read and publicly share. It powers the Wikipedia website and helps in organizing the data of almost everything on the website. It is powerful, multilingual, customizable, and absolutely free of cost.

Once you complete the documentation on MediaWiki, you must host it on the live server for making it available publicly. You can use shared, VPS or cloud hosting to install MediaWiki websites, but I personally do not recommend shared hosting for deploying a MediaWiki website. The reason is that you can face frequent downtimes and server errors due to which, your information will not be visible to the public most of the time. I always recommend small cloud servers like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr etc. to host MediaWiki websites.

With VPS, you must follow a series of steps to create web stacks. Moreover, you need to perform additional steps to configure and customize the whole MediaWiki setup, which generally takes a lot of time and cost.

To avoid all the hassles, you can use Cloudways PHP server host which can easily launch custom PHP applications in 1-click and provides hassle-free MediaWiki installation for all.

Nothing as Easy as Deploying Mediawiki Apps on Cloud

With Cloudways, you can have your Mediawiki apps up and running on managed cloud servers in just a few minutes.

What are MediaWiki extensions?

MediaWiki is a free, open source software application used to form online wikis: encyclopedia-like websites that allow collaborative altering by their clients. It was to begin with, made particularly to run Wikipedia, but is now accessible for open use.

MediaWiki Extensions let you customize how MediaWiki looks and works. Wiki clients can browse through expansions. Framework administrators can install or remove extensions on the MediaWiki establishments that they oversee. Engineers can type in modern expansions or move forward or keep up expansions.

Why Choose Cloudways To Host MediaWiki

Hosting your MediaWiki-based website on VPS can be daunting, extensive and time consuming, if you are not technically sound.

It requires you to cover a lot of details before you can successfully install the website. However, Cloudways takes care of the whole process of deploying your website on the cloud infrastructure of your choice. Here are some of the most prominent benefits of using Cloudways:

  • Optimized stack
  • Unlimited staging URLs
  • SSL, SSH, Git client, Cron Job managers
  • CloudwaysCDN
  • Real-time server monitoring
  • Server scaling
  • Automated backups
  • 24×7 support and server management
  • Cache technologies
  • Free migration

Prerequisites to Install MediaWiki

If you want to know how to install MediaWiki websites on Cloudways, you must know little about these requirements first:

  1. PHP 7.0 (Any higher version)
  2. MySQL 5.8 or MariaDB 5.1+
  3. Libraries : SPL, OpenSSL, JSON, mbstring, fileinfo.
  4. Cloudways Account
  5. Custom PHP application

Luckily, Cloudways has already provided all the requirements for MediaWiki installation process. You just have to create an account and launch server with custom PHP application.

MediaWiki Installation on Cloudways

Using Cloudways, you can launch server on any of the five providers including Amazon, Google’s GCE hosting, DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr. Once you sign up, you get 3-day FREE trial on every server to test out your MediaWiki application. The offer gives you the opportunity to get familiar with the platform and test out new features.

Launch Custom PHP Application

After you sign-up, you can launch custom PHP application on any cloud provider available. Provide the name of application and server, and select the project on which you want to launch it.

install mediawiki on digitalocean

Select Server Size

After you’ve selected your desired cloud infrastructure, choose the server size based on the traffic of your MediaWiki website – you can scale it later when the need arises.

server-size

 

Select Your Server Location

Next, select the location of your server. You can choose a datacenter that is nearest to your audience or home country.

server-location

Once you’ve filled the mandatory fields, click the “Launch Now” button. Wait for a while, until the server launches. Next, login to the SSH terminal using Master Credentials.

launch ssh terminal

Now, navigate to your application folder using the following cd command:

cd applications/your_app/public_html

You can download MediaWiki installation files. But, first open the MediaWiki website and copy the URL of zip file on download button.

download mediawiki

Now, connect the Filezilla client with Master Credentials and move to your application folder. Here, upload the zip file. You can use drag and drop option as well.

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Now, extract the MediaWiki setup folder. It takes some time to complete extraction. For fast process, you can login to the SSH Terminal with Master Credentials and can directly move to the app folder. Now, run the extract command and change the zip file name to “MediaWiki”.

// Extract the zip folder

$ tar xvzf mediawiki-1.32.1.tar.gz

Now after extraction, rename the folder name:

// Rename the file

$ mv mediawiki-1.32.1 mediawiki

Now, open the application by clicking on staging URL in application details page. Add /mediawiki in URL.

http://phpstack-71265-823894.cloudwaysapps.com/mediawiki/

It will show the MediaWiki installation page

mediawiki setup

Now follow the steps and click on continue button.

  1. Select your wiki language
  2. Make sure the environment is checked and showing the green message to install MediaWiki.
  3. Connect to the database by entering db name, pass and host. You can find them on the apps detail page.
  4. Select database engine, in Cloudways case select innodb.
  5. Now, enter the name of wiki and setup administrator account by entering name, pass and email address.
  6. Your installation is complete but continue the process and setup the user profiles and copyright settings, emails, skins and cache settings.
  7. Now, it will show the final installation page, click on continue to install the MediaWiki app and it will show the status like that:

mediawiki installation 8. Click on continue button. You will see the congratulations message and a file will be downloaded called “LocalSettings.php”. You must move this file to the MediaWiki folder where index.php file is saved.

mediawiki installation

You can move the file using FileZilla easily.

mediawiki install directory

That’s it! You have successfully installed MediaWiki on Cloudways server. Visit the main page using the staging URL with /mediawiki.

mediawiki main page

Final Words

With Cloudways, you can now launch the servers on top cloud providers in just a few clicks. In this article, you have seen how to install the MediaWiki website on Cloudways and upload it to the PHP server. You must know that Cloudways offers multiple versions of PHP including 5.6, 7.0,7.1,7.2 and 7.3. Whenever a server is launched, PHP7.3 is configured on it by default, but you can always upgrade its version from the Settings and Packages tab.

If you’re looking for further guidance on setting up MediaWiki, especially when it comes to hosting MediaWiki, feel free to drop your questions in the comments section below. I’ll be happy to assist you!

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Shahroze Nawaz

Shahroze is a PHP Community Manager at Cloudways - A Managed PHP Hosting Platform. Besides his work life, he loves movies and travelling.

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