Manual:Running MediaWiki on Windows

This page's contents mainly superseded by Manual:Running MediaWiki on Windows Subsystem for Linux .

This page will give you information about installing MediaWiki on a Microsoft Windows system using standard installation methods. For Windows-only hosting environments, the WIMP stack (using IIS) was recommended over Apache, (WAMP stack) as of 1.18, for manual installs.

Nginx - an alternative to apache and IIS - may be useful if you support MediaWiki across other host operating systems and/or are already using Nginx for internal hosting.

Required software

See Manual:Installation requirements .

Getting required software

Although these products are not that difficult to configure under Windows, it can be extremely difficult to install (by difficult, it takes 30 minutes for WIMP) and configure Apache+MySQL+PHP one product at a time if completely new to apache/mysql/php. Under such circumstances it is highly recommended to look for a LAMP or WAMP pre-made combination which can just be installed and used. These will save you 99% of the trouble of configuring each package manually. The down-side is that some of these are trimmed down or modified versions which makes it hard to upgrade individual components, and other ones are seriously out of date.

XAMPP

The most popular of which is XAMPP:

XAMPP

WebPI

Microsoft Web Platform Installer can install required pre-requisites for you. See blog.

Bitnami

Bitnami is a free suite of compatible installers for open source software. It supports an Nginx stack [1], Microsoft WAMP [2]), a generic LAMP stack [3] and XAMPP (which it will not install itself and on which only XAMPP-specific bitnami installers work [4]). Bitnami installs MediaWiki on any of those, and they work alongside Wordpress or other software bitnami supports. See Bitnami itself for instructions [5] and updated support data. This can be a good option if you intend to use only the long term stable supported MediaWiki releases. Support for older versions is not guaranteed.

WAMP

See https://www.wampserver.com/en/

WIMP

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/application-frameworks/install-and-configure-php-applications-on-iis/mediawiki-on-iis

Optional Software

Diffutils

Diffutils (which contains diff3) can be downloaded from here, and File (file type checker) from here.

To activate the use of diffutils within MediaWiki, you have to ignore the fact that they won't be found during installation (they may actually be found if you install diff into your path) and open up LocalSettings.php to make the following changes:

- $wgDiff3 = "/usr/bin/diff3";
+ $wgDiff3 = "C:/Program Files/GnuWin32/bin/diff3.exe";

- $wgMimeDetectorCommand = "file.exe -bi"; #use external mime detector (linux)
+ $wgMimeDetectorCommand = "C:/Program Files/GnuWin32/bin/file.exe -bi"; # use external mime detector

Please note that you have to replace "C:/Progra..." with the actual location where you installed the tools to.

ImageMagick

PHP now comes with GD enabled by default which will work for thumbnailing. GD will not require any configuration or modification to be used. Therefore it's highly recommended to not install ImageMagick, since it is known to be unstable. In MediaWiki, disable ImageMagick in LocalSettings.php by setting $wgUseImageMagick to false.

Download ImageMagick on Windows. To make image thumbnailing work, you will need to open includes/Image.php, locate the line that starts with $cmd = $wgImageMagickConvertCommand ., and remove the escapeshellarg() function, then do the same to the next line, so that the command variable builds like this:

 $cmd  =  $wgImageMagickConvertCommand .
       " -quality 85 -background white -geometry {$width} ".
       ($this->imagePath) . " " .
       ($thumbPath);

In addition, check to be sure that the $wgImageMagickConvertCommand in localsettings.php points to:

(your imagemagick folder path)/convert.exe

use the .exe extension! It won't work, if omitted.
use a path without spaces as install path for ImageMagick or use the short name of the path.

Another way to make this work is to add the ImageMagick path to your Windows PATH variable, and simply setting the $wgImageMagickConvertCommand in LocalSettings.php as follows (note that you must still modify Image.php as shown above):

$wgImageMagickConvertCommand = "convert.exe";

Make sure that the Internet Guest Account (Usually IUSR_MACHINENAME) has Read & Execute rights to the ImageMagick bin directory. Without this you might see an PHP shell execution error similar to what happens when it can't find the convert.exe file.

Inkscape

Inkscape can be used as an alternative SVG thumbnailing tool. Download Inkscape on Windows. Here are some example settings to enable Inkscape as the SVG thumnailer in the LocalSettings.php file:

# Image Converter
$wgSVGConverter = 'Inkscape';

$wgSVGConverters = array(
	'Inkscape' => '"/Program Files/Inkscape/inkscape.exe" --export-filename $output -w $width $input',
);

# Image converter path
$wgSVGConverterPath = '/Program Files/Inkscape';

Mathematics Support

See Texvc#Windows.