MediaWiki On Lightsail

This is intended to document how to install MedaiWiki on Lightsail. It's starting with notes on my attempts and has good intentions to mature into a proper tutorial.

First Pass: Debian Speedrun

I did a speedrun through the documentation here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Debian_or_Ubuntu

It works nicely on a $5 Lightsail box. No load test or anything yet, but it seemed snappy for a few quick page edits.

The tutorial didn't recommend installing Emacs. Clearly an oversight on their part. :D

The tutorial doesn't have Let's Encrypt steps; I want to interject those before the first login.

The MediaWiki tutorial recommends MediaWiki 1.34, the latest stable version. AWS Lightsail Debian is Debian 9.1, which has PHP 7.0. MediaWiki 1.34 requires PHP 7.3. You have to use MediaWiki 1.33 or lower to run on PHP 7.0.

To Do

• Document Lightsail Setup
  • Port Restrictions
  • SSH Login Key
  • Distro
    • Try out the "Apps + OS" Bitnami LAMP PHP 7.x instance.
• Let's Encrypt
• Backup and Restore
  • Database Dump and Import
  • LocalSettings.php backup and import
  • Periodic Backup

Second Pass: Bitnami LAMP

I played with the Bitnami LAMP package on Lightsail. It's OK, but the directory structure all starts with /opt/bitnami. All the paths to things like Apache's conf files and the web root path are under /opt/bitnami, and the relative directory structure is non-standard. Using this package as a base means writing a guide that is coupled to Bitnami.

So I looked up the company to see if I trust them. They were a little independent company, they got bought out by VMWare. VMWare is owned by Dell. I don't have a particular problem with Dell, but I don't see the upside in coupling to them to save a few apt install commands.

Third Pass: Debian 10.5

This time around I'm going with a bare Debian 10.5 instance. I used 9.5 for the first pass, it only has PHP 7.0, which the latest version of MediaWiki won't run on. Debian 10.5 (which I don't recall seeing last time, I think it's new to Lightsail) comes with PHP 7.3, which will support the most current MediaWiki.

I used the $5 instance with 1 GB RAM, 1 vcPU, 40 GB SSD, and 2 TB transfer. It's the best price/performance they offer at the moment; as you go to larger instances the price grows faster than the specs. If it can run on a $5 instance, I think it's the right call.

SSL Prerequisite: Primary Domain Web Host

You'll need a primary domain web-host. That's a webserver that responds to http://yourdomain.com/ and http://www.yourdomain.com/. That's not entirely true - there are ways to do it via email, and I'm not 100% sure you need both the domain root and www., but we'll figure that out in a bit when I get to the Let's Encrypt step.

Set it up now if you don't have one, so the DNS records have time to cascade through the nameserver cloud.

Apache Setup

Once it is up, assign it a static IP address. Go to the Lightsail console page on AWS, select your instance, and click on the Networking folder tab. This is the same place where you'll add firewall rules (for now, SSH and HTTP are fine).

Once it's fired up, login and update the OS:

$ ssh -i <path/to/secret_ssh_key> admin@<ip_address>
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

$ sudo apt install apache2

Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate

Install a text editor to edit Apache config files.

$ sudo apt install emacs-nox