MediaWiki Debian Installation
My Experience Installing MediaWiki 1.31 on Debian Bullseye (Buster)
This page will be under construction for some while (started 2020-2-14).
These are no complete installation instructions, but a description of some of the challenges and the possible solutions to set up mediawiki with the following goals:
- As secure as possible, inclusive forward security,
- Short URLs and VisualEditor + Math extension.
The server is separate, i.e. not on my home workstation, and plugged to the router. It's a fanless small machine, consuming between 5 and 15 Watts according to the product description. (Not being paid for advertising, I can recommend it at any time: fitlet2. See also the description at Phoronix.)
I am neither following a logical nor chronological path, but rather choose the various issues from the end with the solutions found. As I have full access to all parts of my network, ssh access is possible. To easily download extensions to the target server from the mediawiki site, I access the target server with
homeuser@homemachine:~$ ssh -Y serveruser@targetserver
and then start firefox
serveruser@targetserver:~$ firefox&
Firewall
Between my homemachine and the targetserver is the firewall, built into my router. So I have to allow port sharing of my target server. Debian's default for ssh is port 22. (For serving http, https and parsoid and mathoid extensions I also allowed ports 80, 443, 8143 and 10043 each for IPv4 and IPv6 to be shared.)