Manual:Installation requirements
In addition to the MediaWiki software itself, you need:
- A web server software to serve MediaWiki pages to the web browser.
- PHP to run MediaWiki.
- A database server to store MediaWiki pages and data.
In addition, there are various optional dependencies which are required if you want to use certain advanced features (see below).
If your website is hosted (i.e. you don't have direct control over it) then contact your server administrator or hosting company to ensure these software packages are installed and available.
To run MediaWiki maintenance scripts, you will need command line access.
One-download installation
If you are using Linux, it's best to install the Apache web server, PHP, and the MariaDB database server using your package manager. On Debian and Ubuntu, do the following:
sudo apt-get install apache2 mariadb-server php php-intl php-mbstring php-xml php-apcu php-curl php-mysql
- Software bundles
On other operating systems, use a software bundle like XAMPP from https://www.apachefriends.org to install and configure all of the important packages – Apache web server, PHP, and MariaDB – with only one download. It is available for Linux, Windows, Mac and Solaris. As of January 2021, the latest version of XAMPP includes PHP 8.0 (MediaWiki requires at least 7.4.3).
Alternatively, if you run Mac OS, you can use MAMP, which is the equivalent to XAMPP. MAMP includes the ability to run the Apache web server and a MySQL database. It is available for both Windows and Mac, but is generally used on Mac instead of Windows.
Web server
In order to serve wiki pages to browsers, MediaWiki requires some web server software. Often you will not have a choice of which software to use – it will be the one provided by your hosting provider.
MediaWiki is broadly compatible with all major web servers that can invoke a compatible version of PHP. Most installations use the Apache HTTPD web server. Nginx (configuration example) is a good choice as well.
PHP
PHP is the programming language in which MediaWiki is written, and is required in order to run the software.
- For the latest stable version of MediaWiki, at least PHP 7.4.3 is required. See the page on Compatibility for further information.
- The following extensions are required:
- calendar - required since MW 1.33
- dom - required since MW 1.34
- fileinfo - required since MW 1.30
- intl - required since MW 1.36
- json - required since MW 1.22
- mbstring - required since MW 1.27, recommended in earlier versions
- openssl - required since MW 1.27, see $wgSessionInsecureSecrets if unavailable
- xml - required since MW 1.27, recommended in earlier versions
- xmlreader - required since MW 1.36
- The following extensions are recommended in addition to the required ones:
- MediaWiki only requires PHP extensions that are enabled in PHP by default. If your hosting provider provides a basic LAMP environment without these, you may need to install or enable these manually.
- In Debian/Ubuntu, the following command installs all recommended PHP extensions listed above:
sudo apt-get install php php-intl php-mbstring php-xml php-apcu php-curl
- In Debian/Ubuntu, the following command installs all recommended PHP extensions listed above:
- At hosting providers with a control panel such as cPanel, you can often use "Select PHP Version" (PHP Selector) to enable these extensions. (For example, after seeing "You are missing a required extension to PHP that MediaWiki requires to run. Please install: intl")
- On most Debian/Ubuntu-based distros the
php-mysqlpackage is required if you want MediaWiki to use MySQL. - Some features of MediaWiki may require PHP functions that execute external processes, like image thumbnailing, that some cheap hosts usually disable. Please take this into consideration if you plan to install MediaWiki on a shared host.
- MediaWiki extensions may require additional PHP features, e.g. VisualEditor requires libcurl support (
php-curlon Debian/Ubuntu-based distros).
If you need to compile PHP from source, then see PHP configuration for compilation options that affect MediaWiki.
Database server
MediaWiki stores all the text and data (content pages, user details, system messages, etc.) in a database, which it is capable of sharing with other web-based applications (phpBB, etc.). You will need one of the following database servers to run the latest version of MediaWiki:
Using MariaDB or MySQL is recommended as Wikimedia uses MariaDB. Any other database servers are less tested and you may likely run into some bugs.
Hardware requirements
The recommended minimum requirements are 256MB of RAM for a single-computer website and 85MB of storage, although this will not suffice for a busy public site or a site with uploading enabled. Some users have reported running MediaWiki on computers with as little as 48MB of RAM.
Optional dependencies
- ImageMagick or GD is required for Image thumbnailing.
- Shell access is required to run Maintenance scripts; upgrading MediaWiki may be more difficult without it.
- Sending email notifications via the server itself requires a message transfer agent (MTA).
- GNU diff3 can be used to automatically resolve conflicts.
- memcached can be used for object caching.
See also
- Compatibility, for information about how MediaWiki's installation requirements are likely to change in the future
- Manual:OS specific help
