On Wednesday, Oct 15, 2003, at 14:02 US/Pacific, Tomoaki Watanabe wrote:

Hi. I and others are trying to install a mediawiki into iBiblio's server for a project, and I would like to get some help.

It seems that installation requires command-line php, which is not available at their server.

Is there any quick work-around that I am missing? Or is this the way it is? (Or am I simply wrong?) I would appreciate any input.

As a workaround for the installer script, you can do it manually. I'm assuming you've got a way of running batch SQL commands, either through the mysql command-line client or through some administrative tool such as phpMyAdmin.

First, create the database: CREATE DATABASE wikidb; (or whatever you'd like to name it)

into this database run the table creation SQL scripts, which are in the maintenance subdirectory: tables.sql and indexes.sql. These create an empty wiki database.

You may wish to create a separate MySQL user for the wiki, if so adapt users.sql to the username and password you want to use and run that on the table as a MySQL user with administrative privs.

Put wiki.phtml and redirect.phtml into the destination install directory. You can put the rest of the .php files there if you like (as the installer does), but I prefer to put them in a separate directory which I then add to the PHP include path so multiple wikis can be run from the same code (and the other source files aren't exposed to the web on the off chance that something weird can be done by executing them alone).

Create your LocalSettings.php and put it into the same directory with wiki.phtml. If the sample file isn't clear, refer to DefaultSettings.php and override anything that isn't going to turn out right for you.

Copy the *.js and *.css files from the 'stylesheets' subdirectory into an appropriate place, which should be accessible as $wgStyleSheetPath.

Security notes:

* the wiki code currently requires that register_globals be on. You may not wish to turn this on server-wide because some programs may be insecure using that mode. See http://php.net/register_globals for how to enable it.

* If your LocalSettings.php contains a password for the database user, make sure you're not saving backup files that will be accessible via the web served as text files.

* Interpretation of PHP in the upload directory really should not be enabled, since anyone could execute arbitrary code as the webserver user. It's also recommended that you set HTML files to server as plain text to prevent cookie-stealing attacks. As an example apache config fragment: <Directory "/usr/local/apache/htdocs/wiki/upload"> php_admin_flag engine off AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml </Directory>

* There's a bug in the upload code that may make it possible to delete files with an appropriately crafted URL. Until this is fixed, you should comment out the call to unsaveUploadedFile() in SpecialUpload.php. This may occasionally leave temporary files around from uploads that are discarded.

Other notes: * iconv support is required, but it's not compiled into PHP by default. If you don't have iconv support, you can work around it by defining a dummy function like so: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconv_hack

* the $wgDebugLogFile must either be writable or be set to "" or you get ugly error messages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)