Installing MediaWiki on Windows Server 2012 R2 Core

This post is part of a series of posts about MediaWiki on Windows :

1. Installing MediaWiki on Windows Server 2012 R2 Core
2. Installing VisualEditor for MediaWiki on IIS
3. Enabling Media / File Uploads For MediaWiki on Windows Server

• Install Server 2012 R2 Core on a machine or VM
• Install IIS using powershell
  • Install-WindowsFeature -Name Web-Server
  • 
• Install Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WebPI)
  • To download use the following powershell commandline :
    • wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/F/F/CFF3A0B8-99D4-41A2-AE1A-496C08BEB904/WebPlatformInstaller_amd64_en-US.msi -outfile webpi.msi
    • !!! The above link is for Web PI v5.0 x64 which is the latest at the time of writing !!!
  • Install the downloaded msi file
    • .\webpi.msi
• Install Media Wiki using webpicmd
  • Change the directory to : C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer
  • Run the following command to install the MediaWiki application
    • .\webpicmd /Install /Application:MediaWiki
  • Web Pi will ask you several questions (config options, usernames and password etc…) at the end you should see :
  • 
• Test the installation
  • Go to http://ip.of.machine/mediawiki in a browser you should see
  • 
• At the next page i encountered a problem, the css didnt load
  • 
• I opened up the source and clicked the link which should load the css, this returned :
  • Exception encountered, of type "Less_Exception_Parser" [ec4dcf50] /mediawiki/mw-config/index.php?css=1 Less_Exception_Parser from line 447 of C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mediawiki\vendor\oyejorge\less.php\lib\Less\Parser.php: Less.php cache directory isn't writable: C:\Windows\TEMP Backtrace: #0 C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mediawiki\includes\resourceloader\ResourceLoader.php(1620): Less_Parser->SetCacheDir(string) ...
• MediaWiki is trying to write to “C:\Window\TEMP” but the user context that PHP is running in (via IIS) doesn’t have permission.
  • !!! This is what I did to resolve the issue, its highly not recommended – it would be better to isolate the MediaWiki temp folder somewhere else !!!
    • Get an object representing the permissions of “C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mediawiki” folder
      • $acl_web = get-acl "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mediawiki"
    • Get an array of just the access rules for *IUSR*
      • $perms = $acl_web.access|?{$_.identityreference -like "*IUSR*"}
    • Get an object representing just the access permissions for the TEMP folder
      • $acl_temp = (get-item "C:\Windows\TEMP").GetAccessControl("Access")
    • Add the access rules from the mediawiki folder to the temp folder acl
      • $perms | %{$acl_temp.AddAccessRule($_)}
    • Set the TEMP folder permissions to the newly created acl object
      • Set-Acl -path "C:\Windows\TEMP" -aclobject $acl_temp
  • I reloaded the wiki page in my browser and the CSS loaded properly
• “Installing” MediaWiki
  • Choose language options and continue
  • The next page told me that i was ready to install mediawiki.
  • At the next page, i added the same MySQL options as during the WebPI command line install of MediaWiki
  • I left the database settings as default
  • Next add a title and create yourself a user account
  • This page allows you to change the reply address on the emails sent by mediawiki and also select some extensions. I choose just WikiEditor
  • Download your “LocalSettings.php”
  • Now we need to get this LocalSettings.php file to the server and store it in the mediawiki root folder.
    • I am using a virtual machine, so I opened the file and copied the text – then on the vm i opened notepad, pasted the text and saved the file as “C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mediawiki\LocalSettings.php”
• I went back to the main page and this time it took a little longer to load – but loaded the Wiki correctly (it didn’t try to take me through install again, meaning it had picked up the settings)
• To fully enable the WikiEditor extension, I had to add some more lines to the LocalSettings.php file more information : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiEditor

Page loading initially was very slow at about 10s per page! This was happening because the database was being access using the hostname – localhost. This brings the ipv6 stack into play, which for some reason slows everything down.

To fix this, change the $wgDBserver variable in LocalSettings.php to 127.0.0.1 to force the use of ipv4