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 on the targetserver
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 further 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.)
Debian on targetserver
fitlet2 comes with LinuxMint preinstalled, but I prefer Debian. The choice of a desktop environment and an Internet server on the targetserver allow remote browsing via ssh. Debian recommends
sudo tasksel
and then select Debian desktop enviroment (plus the choice of desktop) and web server. This installs apache2 and whatever else it needs.