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Mediawiki installation has been covered by quite a number of guides and tutorials, including the help section on mediawiki.org’s own website. I am not going to repeat what has already been said. But instead, I want to outline quickly what your options are when you want to install and run your own Mediawiki server.

Option No. 1 - Hosting Script Installer

If you have a shared-hosting account with cpanel, chances are Mediawiki can be installed with one click of the mouse, because cpanel allows you to install many php based scripts from a central web console. I don’t have experience with other hosting configuration and management software. But a script installer is pretty much standard feature these days.

If you have your own dedicated web server, you can get a free hosting management software such as ServerCP etc.

Option No. 2 - Install Mediawiki from Scratch

If you have relatively good knowledge of Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php, you could do your own installation of Mediawiki pretty easily. It does not matter whether you have a shared-hosting server or a dedicated server, as long as it matches the system requirements of mediawiki.

Generally, if you want to install newer versions of mediawiki, such as mediawiki v1.6 and above, you will need to have php5 and MySQL 4.x or 5.x installed on your server. These are usually pre-installed on most more recent Linux OS.

Misc - Installing Mediawiki on Windows

A lot of people does not know this, but you can actually install Mediawiki on Microsoft Windows. The following description is based on my experience installing Mediawiki on Windows XP Pro.

If you have a relatively clean machine, you just need to download the latest Apache, MySQL 4.x or 5.0 and PHP 5.0 setup programs from their respective download sites. After you install Apache, MySQL and PHP, you need to download Mediawiki and unzip the files to a directory on your c drive. In your Apache configuration file, httpd2.conf or apached2.conf, you add a virtual directory entry to point to your Mediawiki source directory. After restart the Apache service, you should be good to go.

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