How to run MediaWiki with SQLite on a macOS laptop#

Requirements: PHP#

To run MediaWiki you need PHP and the SQLite drivers. I was surprised to find out I had PHP already (if not I would have tried installing through Homebrew). It turns out it comes pre-installed on your Mac!

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~ % php --version
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PHP 7.3.11 (cli) (built: Jun  5 2020 23:50:40) ( NTS )
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Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
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Zend Engine v3.3.11, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

To see version information, do this:

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% cd /tmp
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% echo '<? phpinfo(); ?>' > index.php
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% php -S localhost:8000
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PHP 7.3.11 Development Server started at Sat Mar  6 20:50:32 2021
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Listening on http://localhost:8000
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Document root is /private/tmp
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Press Ctrl-C to quit.

php -S localhost:8000 runs PHP’s built-in development server, saving you from having to configure Apache.

Then visit http://localhost:8000 to view the PHP info page.

I searched that page for sqlite and found that it had the pdo_sqlite driver installed already. So that should be everything I need to run MediaWiki.

Downloading MediaWiki#

I downloaded the latest version of MediaWiki from their downloads page, unzipped it, ran php -S localhost:8000 and got this error message:

Turns out the latest MediaWiki requires PHP 7.3.19, but the version bundled with my laptop was 7.3.11.

I didn’t want to mess around with upgrading PHP, so I used the compatibility page to figure out the most recent MediaWiki version that would work with PHP 7.3.11. I decided to try MediaWiki 1.31, which can be downloaded from https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.31/?C=S;O=D

Here’s what worked for me:

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% mkdir ~/wiki
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% cd ~/wiki
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% wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.31/mediawiki-1.31.12.zip
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% unzip mediawiki-1.31.12.zip
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% cd mediawiki-1.31.12
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% php -S localhost:8000
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PHP 7.3.11 Development Server started at Sat Mar  6 20:58:21 2021
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Listening on http://localhost:8000
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Document root is /Users/simon/wiki/mediawiki-1.31.12

Now visiting http://localhost:8000 gave me the interactive setup tool.

I clicked through their wizard, selected SQLite for the database option and told it where I wanted the database to live:

At the end of the wizard it gave me a LocalSettings.php file to drop into my root ~/wiki/mediawiki-1.31.12 directory… and I was done! Didn’t even need to restart the PHP process (because PHP).

I created a page and then ran Datasette against the SQLite databases it was using like this:

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% datasette ~/wiki/data/*.sqlite