Lighttpd Mediawiki wiki SEO rules and installation

MediaWiki is a web-based wiki software application used by famous wikipedia project. This software is quite famous and scales very well.

Installing mediawiki under Lighttpd is quite simple. If you need clean SEO urls; just follow these instructions.

Download and install wiki software in your domain directory. For example install software under /home/lighttpd/theos.in/http/w directory.

Download mediawiki

Visit official site to download latest version or use wget command:
$ cd /home/lighttpd/theos.in/http $ wget http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.9/mediawiki-1.9.3.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf mediawiki-1.9.3.tar.gz $ mv mediawiki-1.9.3 w
Make sure you have correct permissions to store configuration file:
$ cd w $ chmod a+w config

Install mediawiki

Open a web browser and install mediawiki by visiting url yourdomain.com/w/ i.e. http://theos.in/w/. When done copy config/LocalSettings.php file to /home/lighttpd/theos.in/http/w directory:
$ mv config/LocalSettings.php .

Configure Mediawiki lighttpd SEO rules

Open lighttpd.conf file:
# vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
Locate your virtual domain configuration and add following code:
url.rewrite-once = ( "^/wiki/([^?]*)(?:\?(.*))?$" => "/w/index.php?title=$1&$2" ) url.redirect = ( "^/(?!w|wiki|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico)(.*)" => "/wiki/$1" )

Save and close the file. Restart lighttpd:
# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Configure Mediawiki for clean SEO urls

Open /home/lighttpd/theos.in/http/w/LocalSettings.php file:
$ vi LocalSettings.php
Append following config directive:
$wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";

Save close the file. Fire a web-browser and type url yourdomain.com/wiki/ i.e. http://theos.in/wiki/.

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1 joshua May 1, 2007: This howto does not work. I get 404 and I’m pretty sure the rewrite itself work. BTW you can put the url.rewrite-once anywhere to your config. I have no idea what’s the problem.
2 Fr3d May 18, 2007: Good guide, thanks :-) – however the redirect rule seems incorrect – should it not be redirecting to /wiki/$1, not /w/$1, as that’s where the files were moved to? ;-)
3 vivek May 18, 2007: Fr3d,
I’ve installed wikimedia in /w/ directory, so so it is correct. Basically instead of serving page from domain.com/w/Main_page I’m using domain.com/wiki/Main_page but my user registration and posting is done via domain.com/w/index.php?option url :)
Appreciate your post!