PhpWiki : Steps to Install and Setup

PhpWiki is a free open source web-based wiki software application. It was the first wiki written in PHP and is used to edit and format books for publication. It is a scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation which uses PHP to process and display data stored in a database, such as MySQL or MariaDB. It is a content managing system where any one can edit or delete the pages using a web browser distributed under GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2).

Server Requirements

1) PHP 5.3.29 or higher, compiled with support for the type of database you want to use and with PEAR libraries enabled.

2) Apache Web Server 2.0 or higher compiled with mod_rewrite module;

3) MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQLite.

Installation Of PhpWiki

1) Downloading the source code and extracting.

First step is to download the latest version of PhpWiki which is available at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/phpwiki/ and extract it in to the convenient location under document root of the webserver. The following commands are used to download the software to /opt directory and extracting the contents to /var/www/html the default document root of apache webserver installed on a CentOS distribution.

#cd /opt/

#wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/phpwiki/phpwiki-1.5.3.zip

#unzip phpwiki-1.5.3.zip -d /var/www/html/

#cd /var/www/html/

#mv phpwiki-1.5.3 phpwiki

2) Creating a Database and granting user privileges.

This can easily be done using cPanel. In cPanel, select MySQL Database Wizard from the Databases section. Enter a name for the new database you wish to create and continue to the next step. Enter a username and password to create the database user account and continue to the next step. Select All Privileges to set security permissions the user has on the database and continue to the next step. Now we have to create the tables inside the phpwikidb. SSH to your server and execute the below commands

#cd /var/www/html/phpwiki/schemas

#mysql -u phpwikiuser -p your-password phpwikidb <mysql-initialize.sql

Here replace phpwikiuser with the database user you have created and your-password with the password you entered while creating the user. phpwikidb is the database for the software here replace with what you have created.

3) Configuring PhpWiki page.

Configuration can be done from the CLI interface by editing the config.ini file. Copy ‘/var/www/html/config/config-dist.ini’ to ‘/var/www/html/phpwiki/config/config.ini’ and edit the settings in ‘/var/www/html/phpwiki/config/config.ini’ file according to your needs. In the config.ini we have to provide the necessary details like the name of your website, administrator username and password. Make sure you select encrypted passwords to be stored in the ‘config.ini’ file and the user’s homepages metadata. Set the path to access log file (e.g. /var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log). Set ‘COMPRESS_OUTPUT’ to true (Always try to compress output). Set ‘HTTP Cache Control’ to ‘LOOSE’ so cached pages will be invalidated whenever they are edited. Select the database backend type to SQL. SQL Type (MySQL), SQL User (phpwikiuser), and its password, SQL Database Name (phpwikidb). Set ‘Allow anonymous edit’ and ‘Allow Bogo Login’ to false. Set ‘PASSWORD_LENGTH_MINIMUM’ to at least 8 characters.

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