HOWTO: Install DokuWiki on Tiger

The information on this page is outdated and may not be accurate anymore, since I have since developed .

Despite running PhpWiki for my main site, I like investigating OtherWikis, and DokuWiki is one of my personal favorites for a simple, no frills documentation manager. Since there is apparently a lot of confusion as to how to get it running on , I decided to install it myself on a virgin and share my notes.

Update: David Rostenne sent me an update regarding the July 1st version (which moved some things into data), so I changed the pathnames accordingly.

This will install it under your ~Sites folder, and it will be accessible as http://localhost/~your_username/dokuwiki - which should be fine for personal use. Mapping this to the root and making pretty URLs is a matter of learning a bit more Apache and mod_rewrite, and is beyond the scope of this .

Enabling

I have seen umpteen erroneous ways to do this (so many I have an entire HOWTO that covers most recent versions), and I'd like to make it clear that you don't need anything beyond what you get with to get applications running on your , even though the built-in (4.3.10 for ) doesn't have all the latest trendy extensions.

So read this and come back when you're done.

Installing DokuWiki

Unpack DokuWiki into your ~Sites folder, and rename the directory to something a bit more handy:

$ cd ~/Sites
$ tar -zxvf ~/Desktop/dokuwiki-2005-07-01.tgz
$ mv dokuwiki-2005-07-01 dokuwiki

Now set up the base permissions (Apache runs as www in ):

$ cd ~/Sites/dokuwiki
$ touch data/changes.log
$ sudo chown www data/changes.log
$ sudo chown -R www data

Since DokuWiki's autodetection fails in this setup for some reason, set the basedir by editing conf/dokuwiki.php:

$ cat conf/dokuwiki.php | grep basedir

$conf['basedir']     = '/~user/dokuwiki/';

You're done. It should work right away if you visit http://localhost/~your_username/dokuwiki.

Notes

Although I don't use DokuWiki much, I expect to spend some time hacking it to suit my tastes, and have a few things I'd like to change:

  • The stylesheet (it's great, mind you, but I like to understand how developers separate content from presentation, and adapting Kubrick to it will be a nice way to figure that out)
  • The editing form (too many GIF buttons)
  • Prettier URLs (if I have time for a suitable recipe to drop into an .htaccess file, I'll publish it here)
  • Remove the data and conf folders from the tree (it's too easy to snarf single files from those dirs, and it might be a security risk)

This page is referenced in:

  • HOWTONov 18th 2006