[Mediawiki-l] changing URL vor virtual host

Phil Howard ttiphil at gmail.com
Mon Jun 28 20:06:05 UTC 2010


Mediawiki was originally installed by another person on a server
before Apache was configured for virtual hosts.  I would have just
wiped and and installed again were it not for lots of pages we want to
keep are now in there.  So I'm just trying to manually reconfigure
Apache and Mediawiki to get the new virtual URL to work.

Originally the paths everything was installed in was /etc/mediawiki
and /var/lib/mediawiki.  I have not changed these.

I'm reading this document and trying to apply it to my situation:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL

The host is called "fermat" (no TLD), and that is DNS resolved on the
internal network.  A URL that worked previously was
"http://fermat/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page".  Apache now no longer
listens on the IP address that "fermat" resolves to, so that URL now
gets a connection failure.  This is expected.  Instead, a new name
"wiki" resolves to another IP address.  The server has that IP address
configured, and so does Apache.  Apache listens on it.  It does
connect.  I'm just not getting the contents expected.

Old URL:  http://fermat/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
New URL:  http://wiki/wiki/Main_Page

I am also changing the first directory name from "/mediawiki" to just
"/wiki".  I would have liked to have it even shorter by eliminating
this first path altogether, but one document I read said not to do
this, so I didn't.  I did put in an Apache Alias directive "Alias
/wiki /var/lib/mediawiki/index.php" so that I do not have to use
"index.php" in the URL.

So I have these in "/etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php":

$wgScriptPath           = "/mediawiki";
$wgArticlePath          = "/wiki/$1";
$wgScriptExtension      = ".php";

Previously, $wgArticlePath was not assigned (I added it since the
document had that).  I copied this from
"http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL#Setup_steps" but left
"/mediawiki" NOT changed to "/w" (since I didn't see a need to change
the filesystem path, at least not yet).

OK ... so I go to "http://wiki/wiki/Main_Page".  I actually get our
page contents (the contents we put in there back when it was under the
other URL).  So it seems mostly I got it right.  BUT ... what fails is
that get NONE of the prettiness.  No CSS, no images, etc.  It just
looks like it was rendered from plain HTML.  Are there other steps
which are needed to get that?  I don't see any in the
"http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL" document, and don't
see any link that suggests that.  I would have expected that if more
steps are needed, they would be right there with the other steps.  So
I don't know if this is something missing or something not done right.
 But I got the right contents, which suggests to me the right script
was run in ... maybe ... the right context.

So, anyone have any idea what else needs to be done?  A reference to
the right document should work (if it's a big one, what section to
use).



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