Advertisment

Set up Wiki in 5 minutes

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

Sanjay Majumder

Advertisment

As we all know, Wiki is a Web-enabled software that allows you to freely create and edit Web pages on the fly using any Web browser. This is usually popular among communication groups and forums, where it allows groups to contribute content. In simple words, Wiki is an editable website hosted on a Web server.

It can be used for knowledge sharing. The most popular example of a Wiki is wikipedia.com. The beauty of the whole project is that the user does not need to know HTML to be able to do this. In this article we will show you how to deploy a Wiki website for your organization, and that too without setting up a separate machine for it.

Applies To: IT managers

USP:
Learn how to deploy a full Wiki server in only 5 min

Primary Link:
www.rpath.org/ rbuilder/project/vehera-base/release?id=5112  Google Keywords: Virtual Appliances 
Advertisment

For those who are new to the term 'virtual appliance', they can refer to this month's cover story and read the Server Consolidation and Virtualization section. MediaWiki virtual appliance is a virtual machine image that comes bundled with OS, PHP, MySQL, Apache, MediaWiki and the rPath Appliance Agent. This provides a pre-configured and self-contained, updatable Wiki website on virtual machine.

You can download the appliance image from the link given in the Direct Hit box. Here you will find images for running the appliance on VMware Player or Xen. We have used VMware Player, which is available for free at http://vmware.com. Once you have downloaded the VM image, which is in form of a compressed zip file, extract the actual image files from this zip file and you get two files 'vehera-base-1.6.8-x86.vmx' and 'vehera-base-1.6.8-x86.vmdk'. The first file is a virtual machine configuration file and the second one has a hard disk image of the virtual machine. If your physical machine has less than one GB RAM, you have to edit the configuration file first and change the RAM allocation.

This is the main page of MediaWiki. Here, you can create new communities, discussion forums and highlight current events 
Advertisment

By default, the MediaWiki virtual appliance is configured for 512 MB RAM. In order to change the RAM allocation, open the vehera-base-1.6.8-x86.vmdk file in a notepad and change memory size to 256 “memsize = "256". Save this file and launch VMware player and open the vehera-base-1.6.8-x86.vmdk. This will start MediaWiki virtual appliance inside the VMware player. Once the virtual appliance is booted, you will be shown the URL using which you can configure and use it.

Configuring MediaWiki

Open a Web browser on a remote machine and type in URL https://

Media Wiki Virtual Appliance running inside VMware Player. One can access it using the url of the host location
Advertisment

Note: Before filling the data, you have to set the MySQL user and password. For this, go the VMware player and open the running Linux shell. Now issue the following command to change the password.

# myseladmin –u root password

On the next page, the installation also checks whether all required components are working fine on the appliance or not. Scroll down the page, you will be asked for some mandatory information such as Wiki Name, Admin username/password and DB username/DB password. Give DB username as root and the password that you have set. Also fill rest of the entries and click on 'install wiki' button. This will install MediaWiki on your appliance. Finally, open the terminal console of your running appliance and issue this command.

Advertisment

# cp /srv/mediawiki/config/LocalSettings.php /srv/mediawiki/

With this your Wiki page is ready for you. Access it from your Web browser with its URL and enjoy!

Source: PC Quest

tech-news