I currently host a couple small wikis for worldbuilding information, but the hosting provider for that is going down in a few months, so I’m looking for ways to self host what I got.

I’ve never self hosted with Mediawiki before so this is brand new to me, I’ve already spent a couple hours messing around with Docker but haven’t gotten too far into that. OS is Manjaro/Endeavour Linux between two systems.

Not necessarily looking to host it online immediately to start with, though in the future I’d like to do so when I can get the proper hardware preparations for it, but for now I just want to host it locally to get it set up.

  • @rarkgramesEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    I installed mediawiki for the first time yesterday. Just did a straight install on to a Linux VM.

    One thing that caught me out was that it would take a loooong time to open, but once it did it was ok. It turns out I hadn’t set up any caching and this isn’t done by default. It’s easy enough to do though in the LocalSettings.php config file. Open it in Nano (or your text editor of choice) and find the first line you see below.

    $wgCacheDirectory = "$IP/cache";
$wgFileCacheDirectory = "$IP/cache";
$wgEnableSideBarCache = true;
$wgUseFileCache = true;
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;
$EnableParserCache = true;
$wgCachePages = true;

$wgMainCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL;
$wgMessageCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL;
$wgParserCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL;
$wgMemCachedServers = array();

    In my installation the first line of the above was commented out so I uncommented it and then added the rest of the stuff you see there. Then, just make sure the cache folder has the correct permissions set and you should be good to go.

    Otherwise it was pretty simple. I did have to make sure I had installed the pre-reqs as listed in the mediawiki download page - ensuring apache, mariaDB etc were installed and running, and then it was pretty simple from there on in.

    Also, this video is quite useful if you’re not sure on certain steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpRfwCUC2uM&t=137s