Difference between revisions of "WikiDB/Installation"

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=== Further configuration ===
 
=== Further configuration ===
  
See [[WikiDB/Configuration]] for further (optional) configuration options.
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See [[WikiDB/Configuration settings]] for further (optional) configuration options.
  
 
== Step 3: Set up the database ==
 
== Step 3: Set up the database ==

Revision as of 12:41, 25 February 2011

This page describes how to install WikiDB. If you already have WikiDB installed and need to upgrade to a later version, see WikiDB/Upgrading instead.

Requirements

  • MediaWiki v1.6 or above. The extension is generally well tested on 1.6.10 and 1.16.0, and should work with no problems on all versions in between. If you encounter any problems with a particular version of MW then please report it on the bugs page. These instructions assume that you have already got MediaWiki up and running.
  • Shell access is required for the command-line setup scripts. You can avoid this for a while by manually creating the DB tables but it will probably not possible to upgrade to later versions without being able to run these scripts.
  • Currently WikiDB requires that the database user which MediaWiki uses to connect to the DB has Create Temporary Table privileges. I plan to remove this restriction in a future version.

Step 1: Download and install the code

You can download the latest version of WikiDB as a zipped archive.

Download WikiDB Here!
or visit the file description page for a bit more information (e.g. version details, etc).

You need to extract the file into your extensions directory, which should create a WikiDB folder containing some sub-folders and the main startup script. The path to this folder should be /path/to/mediawiki/extensions/WikiDB/.

If you need to install it to a different location, you will need to adjust the path when you add the require_once() line, below, to LocalSettings.php, and you will probably need to set the MW_INSTALL_PATH environment variable in order to run the command-line maintenance scripts, but otherwise this should not cause any problems.

Step 2: Modify LocalSettings.php

Once the files are in place, you need to modify LocalSettings.php (which is where all wiki configuration settings are stored) in order to load and configure the extension.

Load the extension

To use the extension, you first need to load it. To do this, you simply need to add the following line to LocalSettings.php:

require_once("extensions/WikiDB/WikiDB.php");

You can check that the extension is loaded properly by visiting the Special:Version page on your wiki, where it should be listed along with the correct version number.

Define table namespaces

In order for the extension to have any worthwhile effect, you need to define one or more table namespaces. Table namespaces are where your table definitions are stored, and have special properties which are different to other namespaces within the wiki (for more about the concept of namespaces see this article at MediaWiki.org). In most situations only a single table namespace is required, though it is possible to define several.

To set up a table namespace, you need to first create the namespaces by adding it to $wgExtraNamespaces, so that MediaWiki knows about it (including its associated 'talk' namespace) and then you need to add it to the $wgWikiDBNamespaces array so that WikiDB knows to treat it as special.

For example, here's what you need to add to LocalSettings.php in order to create a single table namespace called Table:

$wgExtraNamespaces = array(
	100 => "Table", 
	101 => "Table_Talk",
);
 
$wgWikiDBNamespaces = array(
	100 => true,
);

For more information, including how to set up multiple table namespaces, see the documentation for $wgWikiDBNamespaces on the Configuration page.

Further configuration

See WikiDB/Configuration settings for further (optional) configuration options.

Step 3: Set up the database

WikiDB has an automated script to set up the database ready for use. The requirements for running the WikiDB maintenance scripts is the same as those for the standard MediaWiki maintenance scripts, i.e. you need command-line access and appropriate permissions to modify the DB schema. For more details about this see mw:Manual:Maintenance scripts.

To setup the database tables, you need to run the SetupTables script:

$ cd /path/to/mediawiki/extensions/WikiDB/maintenance
$ php SetupTables.php

For completeness, and to be absolutely sure that existing pages are parsed correctly for WikiDB data, you should also run the RebuildWikiDB script. On a large wiki, this can be very slow as it involves re-parsing all pages on the wiki. It is also relatively unlikely that existing pages contain DB data if WikiDB has not already been installed, therefore you may choose to skip this step. However, it is recommended that you run it in all cases, to make absolutely sure that WikiDB is up-to-date.

$ php RebuildWikiDB.php