Introduction
Among educational resources, Wikipedia is unparalleled in the amount of content that is being added and edited everyday. MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki application that was originally used on Wikipedia and is now used by many to distribute information in a number of settings. Because it uses one of the most popular application stacks used on the web, LAMP, it is extremely extensible and cusomizable. Stack Harbor has made it easy for you to deploy your very own Wiki web application and begin distributing wiki-styled content.
Accessing Your Application
Once your Stack is built, you can access your application by pointing your browser to http://your_ip_address/wiki. You should see in the title of the page [Your hostname]’s Wiki. This landing page has some information on how to get started creating wiki posts and customizing your website. Before you can actually perform any administrative actions however, you will need to login as an administrator. We’ve stored the credentials for your MediaWiki installation on your Stack — you will need to login to your Stack using SSH in order to access them. If you are unfamiliar with SSH, check out our “Getting Started with your Stack” tutorial.
Once you’ve logged into your Stack, you will see a block of text logged to your terminal. This login message is called the message of the day (MOTD) and contains sensitive information pertaining to your application stack. The first set of credentials echoed in the MOTD are the administrative credentials for your MediaWiki installation. If you click “Log In” on the top right of your MediaWiki homepage, you will be directed to a login page where you will be able to login as an administrator and start making changes to the homepage and begin adding other pages.
The second and third set of credentials pertain to the MariaDB server on your stack. The second set of login information is the root password to your MariaDB server. It’s recommended to create a different database user for every application that makes use of a database server, so we’ve created a wikiuser database account that the MediaWiki application will use to interact with MariaDB. We highly recommend you take note of all these passwords somewhere safe and remove the message of the day by running rm -f /etc/motd.
Final Words
Congratulations! You’re all set to begin creating wikipedia-styled educational content for whomever users you might want to distribute information to. Whether you’re in charge of distributing documentation at some organization or an educator, Wiki applications are hugely helpful in aggregating knowledge and presenting it in a readable format. For more information, check out the detailed documentation written by the folks who maintain MediaWiki. For more information regarding development and server administration tasks, check out our Community Section. From all of us at Stack Harbor, ahoy!