Chad H - Thu, 2016/05/26 - 23:10

Hello all,

I am a complete novice when it comes to setting up and dealing with a LAMP server and Mediawiki. I've inherited the task of managing a wiki server using Turnkey's setup which is currently Debian version 7.10 (wheezy) and mediawiki version 1.19. My issue is that I need a WYSIWYG editor and I tried installing Visual Editor but it requires mediawiki version 1.25+. I cannot seem to upgrade my mediawiki further and am a little stuck on my options going forward. Is there another WYSIWYG editor specifically for mediawiki version 1.19 that I can use? I haven't been able to find any editors for that specific version. Is mediawiki no longer supported on Turnkey? I noticed that there was a recent release listed, but it does not say what mediawiki version it is. Again, I'm a novice and any help or advice regarding this would be appreciated.

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Mon, 2016/05/30 - 05:19
We use the Debian packaged version of Mediawiki as then it can get auto security updates. However it appears that it doesn't have an active developer maintaining it so it is a pretty old version (only the security team doing security updates). We may need to reconsider this in future updates and may revert to packaging from upstream.

The v14.1 MediaWiki appliance still contains v1.19 so that isn't any good to you...

There was a WYSIWYG editor for MediaWiki in the Debian repos but it seems to have disappeared in current Debian releases (probably because of there being no active maintainer).

So it seems the only way forward for you would be to manually install (the latest) MediaWiki from upstream.

I haven't done this myself so I'm not 100% sure that this will work flawlessly. But basically I would foolow a process something like this:

Download the latest version of MediaWiki to /var/www/mediawiki: 

# download MW 1.26.3
cd /var/www
wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.26/mediawiki-1.26.3.tar.gz
tar -xvzf mediawiki-1.26.3.tar.gz 
rm mediawiki-1.26.3.tar.gz
mv mediawiki-1.26.3 mediawiki

# copy in config
cp /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php .
sed -i "s|/usr/share/mediawiki|/var/www/mediawiki|" LocalSettings.php

# copy in images
cp /var/lib/mediawiki/images/* images/
chmod -R 755 images
chgrp -R www-data images

# set default skin
sed -i "s|\$wgDefaultSkin|wfLoadSkin( 'MonoBook' );\n\$wgDefaultSkin|" LocalSettings.ph

# adjust Apache config
cp /etc/mediawiki/apache.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf
sed -i "s|/usr/share/mediawiki/|/var/www/mediawiki/|" /etc/apache2/sites-available/mediawiki.conf

# setup extensions
cp /etc/mediawiki-extensions/extensions.php extensions/
sed -i "s|include(|#include(|; s|/etc/mediawiki-extensions/extensions-enabled|.|" extensions/extensions.php

# run DB update
php5 maintenance/update.php

# restart Apache
service apache2 restart
That should have you running with an updated Mediawiki. You'll still need to install the WYSIWYG editor (to /var/www/mediawiki/extensions). If you are using TKLBAM (TurnKey's backup) you may need to make adjustments to make it backup your MediaWiki install but I'm not sure.

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