Guide to Mediawiki on a Raspberry Pi

(Article under construction)

The UmbraXenu server, with $2.25 in change.

This is a guide to setting up a MediaWiki on a Raspberry Pi, eventually to include a disk image of a pre-configured setup.

Parts needed

• Raspberry Pi - Model B or B+.
• SD Card, at least 8GB.
• USB drive or stick.
• Powered USB hub.
• A router between the Internet and your LAN.

For initial configuration, the following will be needed:

• USB keyboard.
• Either HDMI or DVI monitor.
• Monitor cable. Either mini-HDMI or mini-HDMI to DVI adapter cable.

Raspberry Pi B+

A Raspberry Pi B+ is capable of driving a USB hard drive directly, without the need of a powered hub, however there are some requirements:

• A power supply of at least 2A real capacity.
• A good USB cable with thick wires. Some cheap charge cables use thin wires and even skimp on the copper.
• A change to the config.txt file to turn off the USB current limiter.

Symptoms of low power are the RPI power LED turning off (brownout condition) or the drive clicking as the voltage drops below the working level and resets.

Software needed

• An SD format program.
• An image writer.
• A disk image of the current version of wheezy Raspbian Pi.

Raising up a LAMP

LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP (mainly). It's the "solution stack" needed for most web-based applications.

Getting the show on the road

Once the MediaWiki is running and configured on your LAN, and has enough content, it's time to make it available. (If you want to. If it's a local in-house Wiki, you're done!)

Bots and bad actors

As soon as your Wiki is on the Internet, the bots and script-kiddies will come calling.

Other options

MediaWiki is powerful and quite useful for presenting lots of organized information, but it's not the only game in town.

External links

• Installing MediaWiki on a Raspberry Pi, Trevor Appleton.
• TiddlyWiki5 on RPI.
• Building a Personal Microcontent Server with Raspberry Pi.
• Raspberry Web Server. Websites using Python.
• How this site was built - Weed Pi, Nginx and WordPress.
• BerryBoot v2.0 - bootloader / universal operating system installer. Simple method of installing OSs on external drives.