Manual:Short URL/Page title -- Solution for mediawiki-1.12

From MediaWiki.org

This method is currently in use on several mediawiki-1.10 and a mediawiki-1.11 with the the 1.12-version of WebRequest.php, where Bug 11428 is no longer an issue. This method does not work for 1.11.x, not even with setting $wgUsePathInfo to false, I'm not entirely sure of the reason for this.

The method relies on rewrite-rules.

[edit] apache configuration

The only thing your apache needs is mod_rewrite. Other than that, the solution is actually rather simple:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(index.php|skins|images|icons|opensearch_desc.php|api.php|~.*)
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /var/www/your-mediawiki/index.php/$1 [L]
 
# you can skip this if your DirectoryRoot already points to /var/www/your-mediawiki.
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ /var/www/your-mediawiki/$1 [L]

Explanation: The RewriteCond in line 1 excludes everything that needs to be accessible directly, i.e. the skins/ or images/ directory. The RewriteRule in line 2 is only used if the user requested something that is part of the dynamic content. Everything else is treated by the RewriteRule in line 4 and is only necessary if your DocumentRoot is something different from where your mediawiki is: static files that need to be accessible directly are rewritten without index.php.

This method is very flexible:

• If you need more files/directories accessible directly (i.e. a FavIcon), simply add it to the regular expression of the RewriteCond, which could then look like this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(index.php|skins|images|icons|opensearch_desc.php|api.php|favicon.ico|~.*)

• If your wiki is in a sub-directory (i.e. domain.tld/something/Main_Page instead of just domain.tld/Main_Page) you simple have to replace the slash in every line with the appropriate path:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/something/(index.php|skins|images|icons|opensearch_desc.php|api.php|~.*)
  RewriteRule ^/something/(.*)$ /var/www/your-mediawiki/index.php/$1 [L]
 
RewriteRule ^/something/?(.*)$ /var/www/your-mediawiki/$1 [L]

[edit] Caveats

• Always consider that order of RewriteRules is important and seemingly unrelated RewriteRules might interfere, if they are too general.
• Giving the absolute path as the destination of the rewrites essentially causes the DocumentRoot-directive to be irrelevant in those cases.

The above two facts are relevant in the following scenario:

• If you use the optional RewriteRule in line 4 you may encounter problems with other sub-directories that are located outside of the mediawiki directory-structure, since it is something of a catch-all phrase. An example-scenario is where your wiki is at domain.tld/ and you want to have statistics at domain.tld/awstats. In this case, you have to make sure, that processing of the /awstats directory stops before the processing for the mediawiki-rules starts. You can do this with a rule that looks something like this:

# all the awstats configuration here
#...
 
RewriteRule ^/awstats - [L]
 
# relevant mediawiki config of top-dir goes here.

[edit] mediawiki configuration

Just the good old thing:

$wgScriptPath           = ""; # set this to "/something" if your wiki is in a sub-directory.
$wgScript               = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";
$wgRedirectScript       = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";
$wgArticlePath          = "$wgScriptPath/$1";