Setup of local wiki on Ubuntu

From Stephan

For technical documentation on my PC, I also rather choose to quickly setup a wiki instead of dumping characters in a bunch of text files which I afterwards can not organize easily.

But for backup reasons, I try to change a few things on the standard configuration so the uploaded files and database files are on a location which are automatically backed up using a current online backup system I use (Dropbox).

First I install apache and php5 (with some standard additional extension packages):

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-mysql php5-gd php5-imagick mysql-server mysql-admin

Contents 1 Modify locations 1.1 Apache 1.1.1 Enable mod_rewrite 1.2 PHP 1.3 MySQL 1.3.1 Backup script

Modify locations

Apache

• Press Ctrl-Alt-t
• In the terminal, type

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/localwiki

• Create a local folder where a backup is automatically taken (in my case i.e:)

mkdir /home/stephanbosal/Dropbox/www

• then edit the conf file:

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/localwiki

• In that file, change DocumentRoot to /home/stephanbosal/Dropbox/www, but make note of the previous value
• Now, find a <Directory>-entry with the value noted in previous line and:
  • also replace the directory-value (/var/www) to the one noted in the previous line
  • Change a possible AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All
• Now enable that site by adding a link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled:

sudo ln -s ../sites-available/localwiki  001-localwiki

• ...and disable the default:

sudo rm 000-default

Enable mod_rewrite

This is necessary for the short URLs to be used in wiki

• Go to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled and run this command

sudo ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load ./rewrite.load

• Now restart the server one time:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

PHP

PHP does not really need to be modified, but we can use php to check some settings first: Add a file on the www-root (in this case /home/stephanbosal/Dropbox/www called index.php and enter this code in it:

<?php
     phpinfo();
?>

Now go to http://127.0.0.1 and you should see a page with a lot of configuration data. This can be helpful sometimes.

MySQL

• Either
  • Start MySQL Administrator (Applications->Programming->MySQL Administrator) and log in to localhost
  • Open'Startup parameters' and look at the bottom to see the location of the my.cnf file
• Or (on the root directory):
  • sudo find -name my.cnf
• Look in this file:

sudo gedit /etc/mysql/my.cnf

• ... and note the location of the mysql datadir, probably

/var/lib/mysql

Backup script

• In your scripts folder, create a file named something like

gedit ~/Dropbox/scripts/bckmysql.sh

• And give it this code (replace values where necessary)

#/bin/sh!
#If you do not have Upstart, change next line to sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo stop mysql
sudo rsync -a --delete /var/lib/mysql /home/stephanbosal/Dropbox/backup/
#This is so Dropbox can read the files, at restore, do a chown/chmod to original settings (mysql:mysql 700):
sudo chown -R stephanbosal:stephanbosal /home/stephanbosal/Dropbox/backup/
sudo chmod -R 755 /home/stephanbosal/Dropbox/backup/
#If you do not have Upstart, change next line to sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start
sudo start mysql

• You can add a shortcut button of the backup script on a panel or in the menu, whatever...