rootninja

There’s a few packages you might not have installed that you’ll need before php phpMyFAQ will install. On a basic, headless virtual machine, I don’t install a web server, php or databases by default. So I’ll start from there.

Install a database.

If you want mysql:

$ sudo yum install mysql-server php-mysql

$ sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

$ sudo /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

If you want postgresql:

$ sudo yum install postgresql-server php-pgsql

$ sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql initdb

$ sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql start

Install the web server.

$ sudo yum install lighttpd lighttpd-fastcgi php

Unpack phpMyFAQ under your webroot. If you use the default webroot, that would be /var/www/lighttpd/ (if you use apache, it would probably be /var/www/html/ but some distributions put it under htdocs the way apache meant it to be)

tar zxvf phpmyfaq*.tar.gz -C /var/www/lighttpd/

Optional:

Rename the phpmyfaq directory to just “faq”

Load the page in a browser. Fill out the fields and click Install! If you’re using postgres and you didn’t modify the database user and password, it’s postgres postgres. If you ran the secure installation script for mysql, it asked you to supply the password to use.

Linux apache, lighttpd, lighty, mysql, php, phpMyFAQ, postgresql, yum

Install lighttpd and lighttpd-fastcgi. My version is 1.4.20-6.fc10 but it shouldn’t matter what version you’re using as long as it’s not ancient.

Install php. My version happens to be 5.2.6-5. If you’re trying to install on an older version of Fedora, you will get different versions of all your software, but this should all still work just fine since you’ll grab all binary distributions from the repositories, making upgrading in the future a breeze.

Install postgres (or some other database if you want, mediawiki can use several different ones, just look in config/index.php after you install it and it has sections for all the databases it supports). My version is version 8.3.6-1.fc10

Install mediawiki and then move it under your webserver root. My version: 1.14.0-45.fc10

Edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and enable mod_rewrite, mod_redirect, mod_fastcgi, and optionally mod_status and mod_accesslog (this will allow you to quickly test to see if everythings working by checking the status and current running config, but you could leave this out if you want) If you plan on running in a hostile environment, you probably want to configure mod_auth with ldap or something (i’ll write that up next) and enable logging.

To allow for clean SEO urls, add this: (If you put your mediawiki directory under something else, you’ll want to change the redirect location to something other than wiki.)

And make sure you’ve got this enabled so they don’t get cached along with everything else, (I can’t remember if it was commented out to begin with or not, so just check…)

Now enable php by adding this to that same config file:

If you run the latest up-to-date version of php like I do, then dont forget to change the “bin-path” to your php-cgi installation. I unpack php source in /opt and build it to run from there, so I end up with /opt/php-5.2.9/ and /opt/php-fcgi/ so my bin-path is “/opt/php-fcgi/bin/php-cgi”

Start your database and lighttpd.

If you have any issues, they’ll show up in /var/log/lighttpd/error.log (unless you change the location of this log of course)

Now open your browser and point to the wiki. In my case this was just http://localhost/wiki. Fill out the information, and install. I used postgres/postgres for my super user because it’s a basic installation for testing purposes. If you’re installing a bunch of apps that use the same DBMS on this system then use something like wikidb and wikiuser for the db and user names, or at least something descriptive so you’ll know what you’re looking at when you go digging into the database later on.

“To complete the installation, move config/LocalSettings.php to the parent directory.” just like it says…

I noticed with the default fedora php, you ccan’t log in to your wiki, so I tailed the error.log and saw the problem:

Change the ownership of the directories to lighttpd:lighttpd and you’re all set. Fedora assumes you’re going to be using apache, so the owner is apache by default.

$ sudo chown -R lighttpd:lighttpd /var/lib/php

Linux, howto fedora 10, lighttpd, lighttpd-fastcgi, mediawiki, mysql, php, postgres, wiki

I just got Wordpress installed and completely forgot to change the random password it started me off with to something I might have a chance of remembering.  So to change it, I opened a terminal and changed the password field for the account I just created in mysql.  Here’s how:

First you’ll need to get your password encrypted using openssl.

Copy this hash so you can paste it into your sql statement later.  Now connect to mysql.

If you know the database name you can just connect to it, if your forgot, which I did, just list them all.

Connect to your wordpress database.

And change the password.

And that’s it; all done.  Now you can get back to editing…

Linux forgotten passwords, mysql, openssl, wordpress