mediawiki-admin-guide


  Source:
  https://foxhop.net/f3c4d71b-2f95-11f1-83d8-e86a64d24d78/mediawiki-admin-guide
  Snapshot: 2026-10-16T05:15:08Z
  Generator: Remarkbox d747782

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mediawiki admin guide

This post will document some common procedures that an admin will need
to maintain a media wiki installation.

What version of MediaWiki are we running?

View the source of any wiki page. Locate the generator meta tag inside
the head tag.

Example:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    <html lang="en" dir="ltr">
    <head>
    <title>Main Page - mywiki</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <meta name="generator" content="MediaWiki 1.16.2" />

In the example above our generator is MediaWiki 1.16.2.

Migrating and upgrading a MediaWiki install

This documents the steps I took to migrate MediaWiki to a new server and
then upgrade to the latest version. RHEL4 to Ubuntu.

Install the webserver stack on new server:

    sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-mysql php5-cli php-apc graphviz graphviz-dev

    sudo cp -p /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/001-wiki

    sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/001-wiki

Basic MediaWiki configuration:

    <VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
     ServerName wiki.foxhop.net

     LogLevel warn
     ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error-wiki.log
     CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access-wiki.log combined

     DocumentRoot /www/wiki/mediawiki
     <Directory /www/wiki/mediawiki/>
       Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
       AllowOverride None
       Order allow,deny
       allow from all
     </Directory>

    </VirtualHost>

Create directories and download sourcecode:

    sudo mkdir /www
    sudo mkdir /www/wiki
    cd /www/wiki
    # copy mediawiki installation to new server and untar it
    sudo tar -zxvf mediawiki-backup.tar.gz
    sudo chown -R root:www-data /www
    chmod 775 mediawiki/config/ -R

import MySQL dump into new server

    mysql -u root -p wikidb < wikidb-dump-2012-11-26.sql

Enable Virtual Host and restart Apache

    sudo a2ensite 001-wiki
    sudo a2dissite default
    sudo apache2 restart

Navigate to the new servers IP address or domain name and verify
migration.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source:
https://foxhop.net/f3c4d71b-2f95-11f1-83d8-e86a64d24d78/mediawiki-admin-guide
Snapshot: 2026-10-16T05:15:08Z
Generator: Remarkbox d747782