[Mediawiki-l] Setting up WikiFamily

[Emufarmers Sangly]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 5:12 AM, Samuel Richardson <sam at richardson.co.nz>wrote:

> Hello List,
>
> I've read through the MediaWiki WikiFamily article a couple of times but
> I'm
> having trouble applying it to my own setup.
>
> I currently run about 4 wikis that I would like to share the MediaWiki
> install code between. Each Wiki is currently contained in its own folder,
> runs under its own domain name and has its own database.
>
> Would checking out the latest version of MediaWiki from SVN then replacing
> each of the folders in the base MediaWiki install (excluding the Images
> folder) with symlinks be enough? What do I do about some of the rogue php
> files that living the root of the MediaWiki folder? (img_auth.php,
> StartProfiler.php) etc? Symlink those as well?
>
> I want to get my setup to a stage that updating all the mediawiki installs
> only requires me to run an SVN update in one place.
>

The "ultimate minimalist solution," as described in the wiki family article,
has you just symlink the wiki directories of each site to the shared files:
ln -s /home/user/public_html/example1.com/w /home/user/public_html/shared/w
ln -s /home/user/public_html/example2.com/w /home/user/public_html/shared/w
ln -s /home/user/public_html/example3.com/w /home/user/public_html/shared/w
ln -s /home/user/public_html/example4.com/w /home/user/public_html/shared/w
Then you would truly only need to update the files in one place.  You might
still need to run update.php 4 times, though, and that inconvenience alone
might make another method better.  You would also need to alias the images
directories to avoid the issues Michael is talking about:
In example1.com's vhost:
Alias /w/images /home/user/images1
In example2.com's vhost:
Alias /w/images /home/user/images2
and so on.

I've used this method and it does work, though maybe it's overkill. :)