mythumbsclick's picture

Hi guys

I have an existing Windows installation of DokuWiki. I want to change to a dedicated Linux box so I have installed Turnkey DokuWiki 14.2.

The first thing I have noticed is that AuthAD wasnt working with the error below on the login screen:

AD Auth: PHP LDAP extension not found.

After Googling I found a suggestion to run  apt-get install php5-ldap which cleared the issue and ldap worked for logins. What I have noticed now though is when I open up Media Manager, there is a repeating progress bar but nothing displays. Clicking on the other Media Manager tabs do the same thing. Also when I go to Access Control List Management and search for a group, the searching animation whirls round indefintily but doesnt find anything.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

Tom

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Jeremy Davis's picture

First up, good work on working out how to install the LDAP module for PHP! You are on your path to becoming a Linux master! :)

As a bit of a (perhaps somewhat off topic) heads up, we're (still) in the process of our newer v15.0 release (see here and here). As you can see we haven't yet released a new Dokuwiki appliance, but it should be coming within the next few weeks.

The main reason why I mention that, is that the way we install Dokuwiki has completely changed. Dokuwiki was in the Debian repositories in Jessie (what v14.x was based on). But it's since been removed, so for v15.0 we've installed directly from upstream (i.e. direct from Dokuwiki devs). That has both upsides and downsides. The main downside is that you'll no longer get auto security updates for the Dokuwiki software itself. The other major downside is that migrating data from a v14.x appliance to the new v15.0 one will be a bit of a pain.

The upside is that it will be a significantly newer version of Dokuwiki. And the file locations should match what you'd be expecting (in context of your existing Windows install).

So unless you are in a rush, you may be better off waiting a couple of weeks until we have the v15.0 appliance ready?

Having said that, migration will be possible and will provide an opportunity to hone your Linux skills a bit! :)

But to get back to your current issue at hand. I'm not sure and no one has reported this before that I'm aware of. Although my first guess would be that it's to do with missing and/or incorrect permissions. Looking at the v14.2 build code I can see that the conf script was setting the permissions on a few locations to be owned by the webserver user account (www-data). My guess is that some more of those directories need to be owned by www-data to make it work as you'd expect.

The blunt instrument approach would be to give ownership to the whole directory tree to www-data. I.e. something like this: chown -R www-data:www-data /var/lib/dokuwiki/ (chown is "change owner", "-R" is recursive, so all files and directories, www-data:www-data is user:group and /var/lib/dokuwiki/ shoudl be where all/most of the user files for Dokuwiki are located). Whilst it's likely the easiest way to get it going, it's also not ideal. The reason why we generally keep everything other than what is required owned by root, is that even if your server gets hacked by a bad guy, then the amount of damage they can do is quite limited.

The more precise way to go would be to work out exactly what directories www-data needs access to and only grant those. Unless you are already familiar with Dokuwiki and it's ideal permissions, that may require a bit of trial and error.

One way you may be able to work out what the precise issue is, is by checking the Apache logs. I reckon the one you'll want to look at will be /var/log/apache2/error.log. If that makes no sense to you, please feel free to post it (or at least the last few lines of it) here. Here's some commands to assist with that. First is to display the whole log file, the second is to display the last 20 lines:

cat /var/log/apache2/error.log
tail -20 /var/log/apache2/error.log

Hope that gets you going. Please post back with further questions/info/etc and I'll respond ASAP.

kaktux's picture

as i just installed dokuwiki on debian 9/Turnkey Core 15 via virtualbox (to transfer it to a vserver afterwards) and migrated an old installation there (as it is textbased - just copied the data folder) - there is a quite good howto on howtoforge. Just search for debian 9 and dokuwiki and you'll find it.

Maybe this has some missing pieces for you.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Thanks for helping out with your advice! :)

FWIW we've just provided a new v15.0 Dokuwiki appliance. I'd be interested to hear how it compares to the one your built yourself?!

kaktux's picture

I just took a look at Dokuwiki appliance with virtualbox.

 

Not much of a difference really - only that i have some additional addons (important for me is the upgrade plugin - as it makes life a lot easier. Also - as it is developed by the dokuwiki founder/main programmer (a. gohr) it is sure not to be left alone and stay maintained) - and i made the directories (extensions/templates etc) writeable to be able to add plugins or change template.

For the normal user it will be fine and easy to use.

Btw - as i am new i don't know if it is available somehow - but as i compared bitnami and turnkey a little bitnami has much more documentation. Maybe kind of a wiki where everyone could add the solutions to the problems they faced in a faq way or so would be an idea). For comparision: with bitnami one of the main general faqs was how to get files onto your vm (enabling ssh to use ftp and such) or how to access phpmyadmin (ssh tunnel), while in program specific general problems like "how to migrate" was included. I don't know if maybe this is overkill as you can find most of these answers in the forums etc. of the used programs themselves - but its just a thought.

Reason for the thought is that users new to linux may face the only thing i can think of when installing turnkey dokuwiki: writing rights.

So you have to "simply" enter chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/ (or wherever your dokuwiki installation is).

But you can find the answer to that and a lot of howtos yourself. But guess i can't speak for everyone.

btw- https://www.turnkeylinux.org/dokuwiki

Mysql ? Adminer? Not really needed - aren't they?

Jeremy Davis's picture

Thanks tons for taking the time to provide your feedback.

FWIW I actually noticed that upgrade plugin (and linked to it) when I updated the Dokuwiki readme for v15.0. The appliance page is generated from the readme, so it will at least include a note about the plugin when I update the page (hopefully very soon - one of the many things on my todo list).

I also opened an issue for the upgrade plugin to be included for v15.1 (and it looks like you might have already seen that?!). Thanks for the additional tip though on ownership. I've added that as a comment to the issue.

Re the note about Adminer and MySQL, you are absolutely right. Actually, the Dokuwiki appliance doesn't include either. So that info is misleading and shouldn't be there. There must be a bug in the appliance page readme generation script, as that bit should only be included if the appliance actually has MySQL/Adminer. I've manually removed it for now, but when I update the page for v15.0 (i.e. regen the page text) I'll be sure to keep an eye out for that and fix the script so we can avoid that in future. Again, thanks for taking the time to notice that and point it out.

Re our docs, yes they could certainly be better. It's nowhere near as good as I would like it, but there is a fair bit of documentation. This is something of a "getting started" type page (with links). It's nowhere near exhaustive, but a number of appliances also have their own pages. It probably needs a bit of a clean up though as some of that is getting quite dated now though and may not still be relevant.

FWIW the whole docs section is a wiki. Any logged in user should be able to edit it and add new pages. The only thing you won't be able to do is create pretty url aliases. But if I know that it needs doing, I'm more than happy to make any required adjustments.

Regardless, I'd certainly welcome any suggestions and feedback on how things could be better. If you have time and energy that would be more than welcomed! There's only so many hours in the day and my todo list seems to grow faster than I can cross things off! :)

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