Help:Running MediaWiki on Red Hat Linux

 

Introduction

This article gives detailed instructions for people who want to run MediaWiki on a Red Hat Linux platform.

Important note: you should consider moving to Fedora Core, as Red Hat Linux is now only supported by the Fedora Legacy project. If you run Red Hat Linux on a public-facing server, you SHOULD NOT use anything other than version 7.3 or version 9, and enable Fedora Legacy on your box if you are using one of those two versions.

For information on running MediaWiki on Fedora Core, see Help:Running MediaWiki on Fedora Core.

Prerequisites: Quick Installation of Apache, MySQL and PHP

The major difficulties to installing Mediawiki lie in the correct installation of Apache, MySQL and PHP. This can be obviated by using the xampp which contains all three of these, properly configured for use by MediaWiki.

This can be found at: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Alternatively you can install the three packages separately from your Red Hat or via any third party compilation and packaging effort. In that case you'll want to read a good tutorial on setting up a so-called LAMP environment.

One such tutorial, for Redhat 9, using yum, can be found at:

http://users.tkk.fi/~tkarvine/lamp-linux-apache-mysql-php.html

Red Hat Linux 9.0

Though this version of Red Hat Linux is somewhat obsolete, we consider it useful to provide these instructions. The process will be similar on all other Red Hat and Fedora Core versions, as well as their various derivaties (such as CentOS, the "Community Enterprise OS" rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL, sources).

Most operations require root permission. Be sure to su to the root account before you encounter permissions issues.

Preparation

There are graphic rpm package management tools in this Linux distribution.

 type 'redhat-' followed by 'Tab' key to see what are available in your system
 [root@localhost root]# redhat-
 redhat-cdinstall-helper            redhat-config-rootpassword
 redhat-config-date                 redhat-config-securitylevel
 redhat-config-keyboard             redhat-config-services
 redhat-config-language             redhat-config-soundcard
 redhat-config-mouse                redhat-config-time
 redhat-config-network              redhat-config-users
 redhat-config-network-cmd          redhat-config-xfree86
 redhat-config-network-druid        redhat-control-network
 redhat-config-packages             redhat-install-packages
 redhat-config-printer              redhat-logviewer
 redhat-config-printer-gui          redhat-update-gnome-font-install
 redhat-config-printer-tui          redhat-update-gnome-font-install2
 redhat-config-proc

We need to update all software packages used by MediaWiki in this system. 'redhat-config-packages ' is a good GUI tool for us to uninstall them first. But if you are an expert in rpm, ignore this part.

If you cannot find this tool, using the following command to install it

  rpm -ivh redhat-config-packages 

Uninstall httpd,mysql, and php

Using text console

  [root@localhost root]# rpm -e httpd

Arun Pandey(arunpandey_08@yahoo.com) & Abhijeet Dabhade(abhijeetdus@yahoo.com) (J2EE Developers )

... default packages and configuration for RHEL4 worked fine; uninstall necessary? ... ahecox@uchicago.edu

... remove the tested packages and either hand-bomb new ones or grab random packages which have had no QA for the distro at all? Is that seriously what you're recommending? Is that anything but completely unwise? ... bishopolis@gmail.com

Install mysql

make sure there is no previous version of mysql installed in your system by

 rpm -q mysql

If there is none, proceed to install phase, otherwise uninstall it by

 rpm -e mysql

uninstall any rpms dependent on mysql using the same method too.

Download rpm packages for mysql's server, client and dynamic shared libraries. You can easily search 'mysql' in http://www.google.com for latest rpm packages.

For example:

• MySQL-server-4.0.20-0.i386.rpm
• MySQL-client-4.0.20-0.i386.rpm
• MySQL-shared-4.0.20-0.i386.rpm

Then install them one by one, using

  rpm -ivh MySQL-server-4.0.20-0.i386.rpm
  rpm -ivh MySQL-client-4.0.20-0.i386.rpm
  rpm -ivh MySQL-shared-4.0.20-0.i386.rpm

Initialize mysql database after installation by typing

 mysql_install_db

Following other instructions from mysql doc to change the default empty password for mysql users to what you like

Don't forget to set the mysqlclient.so path into search path /etc/ld.so.conf file. For example, we have:

 /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so
 Make sure /etc/ld.so.conf contains:
                                                                               
     /usr/lib
                                                                               

Then run

/sbin/ldconfig

Install apache web server (httpd)

google apache to find the latest source ball. In my case, I used httpd-2.0.50.tar.gz

Untar it

cd httpd-2.0.50
./configure --enable-so
make
make install

Now you have Apache 2.0.50 available under /usr/local/apache2, configured with loadable module support and the standard MPM prefork.

To test the installation use your normal procedure for starting the Apache server, e.g.:

   /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

In your web browser, access your own machine by address:

  http://localhost

And I am sure you will be proud of what you see now!

and stop the server to go on with the configuration for PHP:

   /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl stop.

Install PHP

google php to find the latest php source package. In my case, I used php 4.3.8

php-4.3.8.tar.gz

untar it

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-mysql
make
make install

There is some warning about using built-in sql support from PHP, I will figure it out later. But this time, let it be as a quick solution.

We need to configure the apache web server after the installation by editing httpd.conf

cd /usr/local/apache2/conf
vi httpd.conf

Make sure you see the following line without # in front of it.

LoadModule php4_module        modules/libphp4.so

Tell Apache to parse certain extensions as PHP by adding lines into httpd.conf, you may search the file by /AddType first to find the proper place.

     AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml     
     AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Install MediaWiki

We are almost done! download MediaWiki package , I am using mediawiki-1.3.2.tar.gz

tar xzvf mediawiki-1.3.2.tar.gz
cp mediawiki /var/www/wiki

You may change the name and directory as your wish.

Change apache www root to wiki directory by editing

vi /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

 #DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs"
 DocumentRoot "/var/www/wiki"

And adding wikipedia's index.php into web server's default first page list by expanding the following line

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php

Save and quit, Start apache server by

 /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

Test what you have achieved by accessing

http://localhost

WOW!!!

Fedora Core 3

This may also be applicable for older versions of Fedora Core. For Fedora Core 4 and later, see Help:Running MediaWiki on Fedora Core.

Problems Upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5

I used similar steps as outlined for Red Hat Linux 9.0, but found that the PHP installer did not sense that I had php4 pre-installed with the stock installation. Find the line:

LoadModule php5_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/libphp5.so

inside the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file, which is correct for PHP5, but will interact badly with another line:

LoadModule php4_module modules/libphp4.so

in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf file. The libphp5.so line was put there by PHP's build environment (the make install step) when I built PHP5 from source. If you have both lines when running the httpd daemon, then a symptom is that when you navigate to http://localhost, you will get a blank web page with no errors. You will also see segmentation violation error messages when you look in the error logs at /var/log/httpd/error_log, as the two Apache modules will not coexist (which is to be expected). Note that is using the Apache2 installation that comes with Fedora Core 3, not one built from source.

The solution is to comment out the LoadModule php4_module ... line in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf file and restart the httpd daemon with the service httpd restart command.

References

http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.apache2.php