Manual:System administration
This page links instructions for common administrative tasks which you may wish to perform once your installation of MediaWiki is completed.
Configuration
If you installed MediaWiki through the web interface, then you already ran the initial configuration script that sets common configuration variables.
MediaWiki has several configuration settings. They must be modified in LocalSettings.php. See Manual:Configuration settings for the whole list.
Toggle uploads on and off
Choosing a design: Selecting a skin
The default skin can be adjusted by modifying the $wgDefaultSkin variable in LocalSettings.php.
A few other settings can also be adjusted regarding skins.
There are also some custom skins, see Special:AllPages/Skin:.
Other
For a list of configuration settings, see:
- Manual:Configuration settings
- Manual:Configuration settings (alphabetical) - an alphabetical list.
To configure specific parts of the software, see:
- Manual:Short URL - more user-friendly URLs to article pages.
Configuration Apache, PHP and the Database
If you have downloaded binary packages of MySQL (or Postgres), the Apache HTTP Server, and PHP, chances are that they came with an installation script that set them up for your system. To tweak them further, see:
Making the wiki fast
Setting administrative rights
MediaWiki is a permissions-based wiki system. That means that users will only be able to perform the actions they are allowed to do.
As declaring permissions individually for every user would be tedious and impractical, several User rights are pre-defined in MediaWiki.
You are also allowed to declare new user groups, as your needs require.
Individual extensions may also require creating new user rights.
Regardless of how they are created, user groups are fully customizable, by modifying the $wgGroupPermissions associative array in your LocalSettings.php file.
Sysop (Administrator)
The most common use. A user marked as 'sysop' can delete and undelete pages, block and unblock IPs and use a shortcut revert-to-previous-contributor's-revision feature in contribs, see Manual:Administrators for more information.
Bureaucrat
Users in this group can change user rights through Special:UserRights.
Bot
A registered bot account. Edits by an account with this set will not appear by default in Recent changes; this is intended for mass imports of data without flooding human edits from view. (Add &hidebots=0 to list changes made by bots e.g. like this)
Installing extensions
Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core.
Localisation
If you simply want to change the language of a wiki on a per-user basis, this can be done via Special:Preferences. If you selected the wrong language when setting up the wiki simply change the $wgLanguageCode in LocalSettings.php.
Maintenance scripts
MediaWiki has some maintenance script to help do administrative tasks.
Update MediaWiki
- See Manual:Upgrading
Getting data
Back up
It is important to make regular backups of the data in your wiki. This includes the database, uploaded files and extensions.
Importing a database dump
If you want a local copy of a Wikimedia wiki, see the overview at meta:Data dumps and the download site.
Converting (importing) existing content
Some scripts exist to import data from other wiki engines.
On-wiki customizations
Much of the appearance and messaging of MediaWiki is determined by messages that administrators can edit like regular wiki pages.
- For a brief overview that addresses the empty help pages, see Project:PD help/Copying.
Changing the sidebar
- See Manual:Sidebar