Steps to Install and Setup PhpWiki

Published on February 27th, 2017

PhpWiki is a wiki software application that is freely available and written in PHP. It was the initial wiki built in PHP and is utilized for editing and formatting books for publication. PhpWiki is a scalable software and an extensive implementation of a wiki that employs PHP to process and exhibit data saved in a database, such as MySQL or MariaDB. It is a system for managing content, where users can modify or delete pages using a web browser. PhpWiki is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2).

Server Prerequisites

1) PHP 5.3.29 or newer, compiled with support for the desired database type and with enabled PEAR libraries.

2) Apache Web Server 2.0 or newer, compiled with the mod_rewrite module;

3) MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or SQLite.

Installing PhpWiki

1) Downloading the source code and extracting.

To begin, download the most recent version of PhpWiki from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/phpwiki/ and extract it into a convenient location within the document root of your web server. The following commands demonstrate how to download the software to the /opt directory and extract its contents to the default document root of an Apache web server 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.

You can easily accomplish this using cPanel. In cPanel, navigate to the Databases section and select the MySQL Database Wizard. Provide a name for the new database you wish to create and proceed 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 define the user’s security permissions for the database and proceed to the next step. Next, we need to create the tables within the phpwikidb. SSH into your server and execute the following commands:

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

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

Here, replace ‘phpwikiuser’ with the username of the database user you created, and ‘your-password’ with the password you set while creating the user. ‘phpwikidb’ is the name of the database for the software; replace it with the name you chose.

3) Configuring the PhpWiki page.

Configuration can be performed through the Command Line Interface by editing the ‘config.ini’ file. Copy ‘/var/www/html/config/config-dist.ini’ to ‘/var/www/html/phpwiki/config/config.ini’ and modify the settings within the ‘config.ini’ file to suit your requirements. In ‘config.ini’, you must provide essential details such as your website’s name, administrator username, and password. Ensure that you choose encrypted passwords to store in the ‘config.ini’ file, along with the user’s metadata homepage. Set the path to access the log file (e.g., /var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log). Set ‘COMPRESS_OUTPUT’ to true (always attempt to compress output). Set ‘HTTP Cache Control’ to ‘LOOSE’ to invalidate cached pages whenever they are edited. Select the SQL database backend type. Specify the SQL Type (MySQL), SQL User (phpwikiuser), password, and SQL Database Name (phpwikidb). Set ‘Allow anonymous edit’ and ‘Allow Bogo Login’ to false. Finally, set ‘PASSWORD_LENGTH_MINIMUM’ to a minimum of 8 characters.

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