How to install MediaWiki on a subdomain

Here is how to set up MediaWiki on a subdomain and use pretty/short URLs. This was tested on July 1, 2010 with MediaWiki 1.15.4, PHP 5.2.8, MySQL 5.0.90 and Apache 2.2.11.

This assumes you are in a shared hosting situation, and do not have root access and cannot edit the Apache configuration files directly.

Your setup

Suppose you have a site, www.ilikefish.com. Its DocumentRoot is /var/www/ilikefish.com. You then create a subdomain, wiki.ilikefish.com, with a DocumentRoot of /var/www/ilikefish.com/wiki.

Configuring Apache

  1. In /var/www/ilikefish.com/.htaccess, set up a redirect

    RedirectMatch /wiki/(.*) http://wiki.ilikefish.com/$1

  2. In /var/www/ilikefish.com/wiki/.htaccess, set up rewrite rules:

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Configuring MediaWiki

  1. In LocalSettings.php, set the following variables:

    $wgScriptPath = "";
    $wgArticlePath = "/$1";
    $wgUsePathInfo = true;
    $wgLogo = "/my_fish_logo.png";
    $wgScriptExtension = ".php";

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5 Comments

  1. Hi Paul,

    What would one do if one wanted a multi-lingual website with, e.g. en.ilikefish.com/wiki, fr.ilikefish.com/wiki etc. etc.?

    Thanks

    Mith

  2. Hi,
    I created a domain wiki.example.com and installed a mediawiki 1.20.6 on my server. I want to create some new pages but I can’t!
    I can see the red link but as I click on the link I get this error:

    Server error
    The website encountered an error while retrieving http://wiki.sarveno.com/index.php?title=Marketing_Automation&action=edit&redlink=1. It may be down for maintenance or configured incorrectly.
    Here are some suggestions:
    Reload this webpage later.
    HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error): An unexpected condition was encountered while the server was attempting to fulfill the request.
    would you please help me in this case?

    Thank you
    Reza

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