After deploying a few custom servers to support both Ruby and php applications, setting up a server to run MediaWiki seemed like a breeze.  And it is, sort of, so long as you know where to draw the line.

It seemed plausible to create a Chef cookbook to deploy a ready-to-run MediaWiki installation.  And I wasted a lot of time trying.  At first I was delighted that there was so much setup documentation, but as I dug  in to it, I realized that it was virtually all written for a barely-technical audience. Important details were missing and once you got outside the “recommended” web-based install directions, there were even factual errors.

So after trying a number of things,  documented and undocumented, I finally conceded that the only really supported way to do an install is using the web install method that MediaWiki provides.  It’s a shame really, since all it does is set up the database and create the LocalSettings.php file.  But the docs are simply not sufficient to support automating anything further.

Here’s what works

You can use Chef to set up:

• the basic server niceties, like a firewall, email support for crontab jobs, and the like
• the basic LAMP stack and php using the supported apache2, php and mysql cookbooks
• MySQL users and create the database.  While the MediaWiki installer would create the production MySQL user and database for you, there’s no harm in letting Chef do it first, and the value is that Chef will maintain the resources.
• the MediaWiki image and initial files.  I automated pulling the MediaWiki tar file, and expanding it into the public www directory, with a guard to prevent if it already exists.

But that’s all!  Efforts to build out the database using the MediaWiki scripts failed, and the LocalSettings.php file just seems to require manual editing whatever you do.  So after the Chef build you still have to run the web-based setup, and copy (and probably edit)  the generated LocalSettings.php back to the document root directory of the site.

That’s not how we like to roll here… it’s not terrible but it’s a step backwards toward the manual setup + “servers as pets” thing, and for now we’re stuck with it.

Update: it gets worse

After backing off from trying to automate any actual MediaWiki installation, I thought I was out of the woods.  Since I was planning to add Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Forms, I thought it would be OK to install these packages using Composer as part of the server build.  (Nope) That results in an immediate error when trying to run the MediaWiki web-based installer.

So now my “automated” install has to work like this:

• Use Chef to converge a new server
• Run the manual web-based MediaWiki installer
• Copy the LocalSettings.php file back up to the new server
• Manually add the extensions I want to use via php Composer (and any other required install steps, including a frequent requirement to edit the LocalSettings.php file.)

It’s really not looking much like an automated solution anymore, but that seems like the best I can do.  After using tools like Chef and Capistrano for deployment, I am finding the process for installing MediaWiki to be rather unsatisfying.