Introduction

MediaWiki is a free and open-source application that allows anyone to create a wiki website on a self-hosted server. These kinds of websites are beneficial in contexts where several people need to create and modify pages in a quick and easy way.

Note: The installation guide of this article supports CentOS 7 and CentOS 8.

Prerequisites

A root or non-root user with sudo privileges.

Install LAMP Server:

Note: First two steps are not required for CentOS 8.

You need to enable the EPEL and Remi repositories to install the latest PHP version.

# sudo yum -y install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm
# sudo yum install epel-release -y

Next, we are going to enable php7.3 from the Remi repository.
```
# sudo yum-config-manager --enable remi-php73
```
Before installing MediaWiki First, need to install Apache, MariaDB, PHP, and other PHP extensions on the server and run the below command to install all the LAMP components.
```
# sudo yum install -y httpd mariadb mariadb-server php php-mysqlnd php-gd php-xml php-intl php-mbstring php-json
```

Create a Database:

Start and enable the MariaDB services before creating the database.

# sudo systemctl start mariadb
# sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

Login to the MariaDB shell.
```
# mysql
```
Create a MediaWiki database.
```
CREATE DATABASE mediawiki;
```

Create a user for MediaWiki and give the privileges to the user on the MediaWiki database.

CREATE USER 'wikiuser'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mediawiki.* TO 'wikiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Flush the privileges and exit from the MariaDB.
```
flush privileges;
exit;
```

Download and install MediaWiki:

Install wget package.
```
# sudo yum install wget -y
```

Download the latest version of MediaWiki to the Apache web root directory.

# wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.32/mediawiki-1.32.0.tar.gz --no-check-certificate

Once the download is completed, unzip the downloaded file with the following command.
```
# sudo tar -zxvf mediawiki-1.32.0.tar.gz
```
Move the extracted directory to the Apache web root directory.
```
# mv mediawiki-1.32.0 /var/www/html/mediawiki
```
Set proper permission to the MediaWiki with the following command.
```
# sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/mediawiki/
```
If SELinux is enabled on your system then apply the below SELinux rule on the MediaWiki directory.
```
# getenforce
# sudo restorecon -FR /var/www/html/mediawiki/
```

Enable and restart the Apache service.

# systemctl enable httpd
# systemctl restart httpd

Open your web browser and access the MediaWiki installation page using http://ip_address/mediawiki/. Click on the set_up_the_wiki link as shown below image to set up MediaWiki.