Herps of Arkansas: PmWiki Installation

This page explains how to download and install PmWiki 2.1 and 2.2. Here's a list of related pages:

Requirements - Pre-requisites for running the PmWiki wiki engine
Upgrades - How to upgrade an existing PmWiki installation
Wiki Farms - Running multiple wikis from a single installation
Change Log - Log of changes made to PmWiki by Release

Improvements to these instructions are always appreciated. Just report any problems you encounter to the pmwiki-users mailing list or use the PmWiki Issue Tracking System.

Installing PmWiki

If you upgrade, please read the page Upgrades and Release notes.

1. Download

Download the latest stable version of PmWiki as a

zip archive (pmwiki-latest.zip), or a
gzipped tarball (pmwiki-latest.tgz) from http://pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/, or

Download the latest beta version from the PmWiki:Subversion page.

2. Unpack

Unpack the archive (tar zxvf pmwiki-latest.tgz or unzip pmwiki-latest.zip). This will create a pmwiki-x.y.z directory containing the PmWiki software. For example, the current "latest" should unpack to a directory named pmwiki-2.2.145. The files in this directory include:

  README.txt        An introductory document
  pmwiki.php        The main PmWiki script
  local/            Configuration scripts (local configuration files)
  cookbook/         Recipes (add-ons) from the Cookbook
  docs/             Brief documentation, sample configuration scripts
  pub/              Publicly accessible files
  pub/css/          Extra CSS stylesheet files ^[1]
  pub/guiedit/
  pub/skins/        Layout templates for custom look and feel
  scripts/          Scripts that are part of PmWiki
  wikilib.d/        Bundled default PmWiki pages

The pmwiki-x.y.z directory needs to be placed into a location accessible by your webserver (e.g., in a public_html directory of some sort). You can place files and directories using a number of methods -- FTP, or a Unix mv or cp command generally does the job.

Note: It is recommended to change the "pmwiki-x.y.z" directory name to be simply "pmwiki" or just "wiki".

3. Create directories

In most cases PmWiki will do this for you. Open a web browser to the pmwiki.php script on the server (i.e., not the one on your local computer or accessed using a file://... URL). PmWiki will then analyze your system configuration and provide instructions (if needed) for creating the wiki.d/ directory which will be used to hold the pages created for your site.

Otherwise, there are two ways to achieve this. (Use Filezilla or WinSCP to change FTP file/folder permissions.)

3a. You can create the wiki.d/ directory manually, and then give it full write permissions (i.e., "chmod 777 wiki.d"). Use this method when "safe mode" is activated in the server's PHP installation.

3b. On some systems you can let PmWiki create wiki.d/ by temporarily changing the permissions on the directory containing the pmwiki.php file to 2777. In Unix this is commonly done by changing to the directory containing pmwiki.php and executing the command

chmod 2777 .

(note the dot at the end). The chmod command also works in many FTP programs. Creating wiki.d/ in this manner will (1) make the directory writable so the web server can create the data directory it needs for the wiki files, (2) preserve group ownership of the directory so the installer account can manipulate the files created in this directory, and (3) make it more difficult for other accounts on the same server to access the files in wiki.d/.

After establishing directory permissions, try opening a browser to the pmwiki.php script again. If all is well, the wiki.d directory will have been created and you'll see the default home page.

Important: If you used method 3b, you should reset permissions by executing "chmod 755 ." in the directory containing pmwiki.php.

4. Initialize

Check out Initial Setup Tasks for other tasks you may want to perform to begin customizing your PmWiki installation. You might also want to peruse the Release Notes for further information.

5. Set language

If you want to use PmWiki in a different language download the international language pack as zip archive (i18n-all.zip) from http://pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/i18n/. Then extract it and copy the files into the wikilib.d/ directory as described above. Besides the -all file you can also download your country localization file only.

Languages available are:

There are two directories in the decompressed i18n archive, scripts and wikilib.d. Copy the files respectively contained in these directories to the scripts and wikilib.d of your PmWiki directory. For example, for French localization, PmWikiFr.* and PmWiki.* must be contained in the same directory.

Then, enable localization by adding an instruction to local/config.php to load the language translation page of your choice. For instance, XLPage('fr','PmWikiFr.XLPage'); loads the French language page PmWikiFr.XLPage.

Read more about this on Internationalizations.

Notes

The PmWiki distribution deliberately doesn't include an index.php file. You can easily add your own "wrapper script" in the same directory as pmwiki.php. Create a new file called index.php with the following single line of text (missing a closing " ?>" tag deliberately):
<?php include_once('pmwiki.php');

Resist the temptation to rename pmwiki.php to index.php because if you rename the file it will not be overwritten during an upgrade.

If using the Unix tar command to unpack the archive in step 2 above, be sure that the files are created with sufficient permissions for the webserver to be able to access them. Usually you can ensure this by typing umask 002 on the command line before unpacking the tar file.
When installing on Windows you should take a look at Cookbook:SimultaneousEdits to enable simultaneous edits on that platform.
Additional tips can be found at Troubleshooting.

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PmWiki Installation