Setting up a Wiki SCS Admins Talk 9/13/2005 Tod Pike

What's a Wiki? ● A web-based collaboration tool ● An unstructured document management system ● An intranet ● An issue or trouble ticket tracking system ● A Perl-based system to convert text to HTML ● Whatever you want it to be!

Some Twiki Features ● can be used with any web browser ● simple text formatting commands to do many common formatting tasks ● pages are grouped into collections called webs ● structured content ● revision control ● full text search

Assumptions/Requirements ● Primarily Linux based, although Windows installation possible ● Primarily for Apache web server (IIS possible) ● This talk is aimed at installing on a facilitized Linux machine (RH9) ● Twiki is lightweight – anything that will run Apache will work

Test Machine Configuration ● Pentium II 300MHz ● 256 MB Memory ● 20GB Hard Drive ● RedHat 9 facilitized ● TWiki software takes up ~11MB

Preliminaries ● Get the software - ● Review installation instructions ● Get root access on Linux box

Install Web Server (wwwsrv) ● (note: wwwsrv not available on FC3 yet) ● become root ● put “services=wwwsrv” in /etc/quirk.local ● run “dosupdepot” ● run “/usr/local/etc/nanny -reconfig /etc/nanny.conf” ● verify that httpd is running

Install Twiki Software ● Suggest installing in /usr0 ● cp TWiki tar.gz to /usr0 ● tar xvzf Twiki tar.gz ● check for security patches

Configure HTTPD

Configure Twiki ● edit /usr0/twiki/bin/setlib.cfg, set $twikiLibPath ● edit /usr0/twiki/lib/TWiki.cfg, check variables ● secure twiki/data, templates and lib directories by copying in subdir-htaccess.txt to.htaccess ● set file permissions - see: ● verify with http: /twiki/bin/testenvhttp: /twiki/bin/testenv

Configure your Twiki ● set site variables in: http: twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiPreferences http: twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiPreferences ● set up authentication – rename twiki/bin/.htaccess.txt to.htaccess – edit it, see comments at the top – basic authentication is default – set a password using “htpasswd” command for TwikiGuest (default is “Guest”)

More on Authentication ● see install docs for important information about setting up authentication – some files need to be renamed for the registration form ● possible to use WebISO – really a web server issue, not a Wiki issue.

Customize your Wiki ● Edit pages individually ● Set up skins – My skin preference is “dragon” – Edit TwikiPreferences to change ● Add plugins ● Anyone can edit anything! Revision control available for backing changes out.

Wiki Editing Basics ● Separate each paragraph with a blank line. ● To display a word or phrase in bold type, put it in asterisks: *bold type*. ● To display a word or phrase in italic, put it in underscores: _italic_. ● To display a word or phrase in bold italic, put it in double underscores: __bold italic__. ● To link to another Wiki topic, type the WikiWord for that topic. To link to a Wiki topic in another web, type the name of the web, and a dot: Sandbox.WebHome.

More Editing Basics ● headings: Topic (add dashes for sub- headings) ● list items: * (add 3 spaces for nested items) ● ordered list: number. ● definition: $term: def ● lots more of these!

Other Wiki Versions ● PmWiki: (used by official CSD site) ● MediaWiki: (used by Sapphire project, Wikipedia) ● many others – pick one you like and suits your programming skills (php vs. Perl, etc)

Demo

Questions ?