Installing Mediawiki on Pivotal Web Services
About this page
This is a rough draft, written for someone with a lot of context about using Cloud Foundry.
Setup
Download the latest stable Mediawiki and unpack it. Remove the /vendor
directory; it's better handled by Composer.
I've included in this repo a composer.lock
for Mediawiki 1.28.2, and a cf manifest sample. Copy those into the Mediawiki folder.
Rename the manifest sample into manifest.yml, and edit the placeholder values for the wiki host and name.
You should be able to cf push
now, go to the https page, and be able to start entering configuration details.
Database setup
We're going to bind a database to the wiki app, and pry the details out of it just long enough for Mediawiki to set up the database.
Let's attach a cleardb database. I chose that because it looked like the only MySQL / MariaDB offering that was free.
cf create-service cleardb spark jameswikidb
cf bind-service jameswiki jameswikidb
Ok, let's try Postgres instead, because I'm getting size complaints from cleardb.
cf create-service elephantsql turtle jameswikidb
cf bind-service jameswiki jameswikidb
Ah, a new Mediawiki setup squeaks in just below the 5mb cutoff for cleardb. ElephantSQL has a more gracious 20mb cutoff for free accounts.
Wiki setup
We'll use details from cf env jameswiki
to set up the wiki database.
cleardb / mysql
Specifically under VCAP_SERVICES.cleardb.credentials
on the wiki setup:
- Database host:
hostname
- Database name:
name
- Database table prefix: you can make one up, like
jameswiki
- Database username:
username
- Database password:
password
ElephantSQL / postgres
The details we need are under VCAP_SERVICES.elephantsql.credentials.uri
. The syntax:
postgres://(username):(password)@(hostname):5432/(database name)
Further wiki setup
If you let the wiki install ask more questions, you can:
- make it a private wiki.
- email is on by default. This might not work as-is, or be a good idea.
- enable file uploads - this is disabled by default, and is tricky on cf.
- ... continue. it will give you a
LocalSettings.php
file to download.
Tweak LocalSettings.php
This is a Day Two sorta thing: nice to have, but not crucial.
We can tweak LocalSettings.php
to handle service creds rotation and move out secrets.
Copy LocalSettings.php
into the Mediawiki folder. Edit it, along with the manifest.
Replace the ## Database settings
section:
$url = parse_url(getenv("DATABASE_URL"));
$wgDBtype = "mysql"; # or "postgres", as appropriate
$wgDBserver = $url["host"];
$wgDBname = substr($url["path"], 1);
$wgDBuser = $url["user"];
$wgDBpassword = $url["pass"];
While we're at it, we can move the values for wgSecretKey
and wgUpgradeKey
into the manifest. Manually copy them over, and replace them in LocalSettings.php
with:
$wgSecretKey = getenv("SECRET_KEY");
$wgUpgradeKey = getenv("UPGRADE_KEY");
Update the app
After that, cf push
should put the config in place, and the wiki should be usable.
You should make a new user so you're not always running as admin:
Log in as Admin, hit the sidebar's "Tools / Special Pages," and see "Login / Create account", "Create account."
And then it's all success and unicorns and rainbows.
Upgrading
Preserve LocalSettings.php
and the manifest.
Updating the composer files
Download the new Mediawiki version tarball locally and unpack it.
(Git would be nicer, but the repo lacks skins by default.)
Remove the /vendor
directory, to avoid confusing composer.
Install composer, if you don't have it already:
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
That will put an executable composer.phar
in the current directory.
To make the new composer.lock
, run ./composer.phar update
.
References
- Ron Gross' blog post about running Mediawiki on Heroku
- caseywatts' gist on Mediawiki on Heroku, largely based on Ron Gross', above. This has info on adding the vector skin if you go the Mediawiki git repo route. This has a cleaner way of parsing the database connection string.