Setting up this MediaWiki

Setting up a cloud ubuntu box

I setup an Ubuntu box on the cloud (Vultr).

ufw allow 80 so firewall allows HTTP traffic.

Install mediawiki

I followed this guide:

https://www.atlantic.net/vps-hosting/how-to-install-mediawiki-ubuntu-20-04/

At this point http://108.61.173.103 shows the default "Apache is running" /var/www/html/index.html and http://108.61.173.103/mediawiki shows the wiki.

Purchase a domain and point it to the box IP

I purchased a domain (ient.ai) and created an A-record that sends sap to 108.61.173.103.

It took a few hours for the change to make it to the DNS servers.

Now sap.ient.ai in Chrome directs to the /var/www/html/index.html

Redirect index.html in the Apache webroot to the wiki

Now I replace the index.html with:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=mediawiki/index.php" />
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

Now sap.ient.ai in Chrome directs to http://108.61.173.103/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page & shows the wiki.

At this point I played with changing the webroot in /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf to DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mediawiki but decided I'd rather reserve the option to have a website/landing-page and not auto-direct to the wiki, so I reverted it.

Remember to systemctl restart apache2 every time you tweak Apache.

Tidy URL

Now to tidy that URL.

In /var/www/html/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php:

## The protocol and server name to use in fully-qualified URLs
# $wgServer = "http://108.61.173.103";
$wgServer = "http://sap.ient.ai";  # pi

Now URL shows as http://sap.ient.ai/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page

Challenge is to get http://sap.ient.ai/wiki/Main_Page

a2enmod rewrite (and restart Apache). This enables the rewrite module (rewriting paths, I guess)
Create '/var/www/html/.htaccess':

root@MediaWiki:/var/www/html# cat .htaccess
RewriteEngine On

# main rewrite rule
RewriteRule ^/?wiki(/.*)?$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/mediawiki/index.php [L]

# Redirect / to Main Page
RewriteRule ^/*$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/mediawiki/index.php [L]

Allow .htaccess files to be used in webroot (and subfolders):
In /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Require all denied
</Directory>

<Directory /usr/share>
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>

<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>

# pi: ^ None -> All (x3)

In /var/www/html/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php:
```
$wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";
```

Now sap.ient.ai in Chrome loads the wiki main page, and URL bar shows http://sap.ient.ai/wiki/Main_Page

Enable Markdown

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiMarkdown#Installation

NOTE: I had to create the composer.local.json

NOTE: For the downloads:

cd extensions
git clone https://github.com/BenjaminHoegh/ParsedownExtended
git clone https://github.com/kuenzign/WikiMarkdown/