I had planned on setting up a private Wiki to use as a personal clipboard collection of useful snippets for some time now but never got around to it. This week I decided it was time to get it done and so I started searching for Wiki software. I ended up trying MediaWiki but ran into installation issues due to PHP’s session.save_handler not being set. After changing it I ran into more issues and with MediaWiki unable to store session data I couldn’t proceed. I’m not sure why MediaWiki requires this setting though as I run several WordPress websites and some other PHP code as well and they’re not having this issue.
Moving on I found out about DokuWiki which is really easy to install! Simply download the package, extract it and you’re done! It doesn’t require special database software such as MySQL – it stores pages on disk. Zero hassle and easy to use as well!
Since I’m not using Apache I can’t use .htaccess files. DokuWiki has a couple of folders which should not be exposed to the outside world. For Lighttpd my configuration looks like this:
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^wiki.example.com$" {
server.document-root = "/home/example/wiki.example.com/httpdocs"
# deny access completely to these
$HTTP["url"] =~ "/(\.|_)ht" { url.access-deny = ( "" ) }
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^" + "/(bin|data|inc|conf)/" { url.access-deny = ( "" ) }
}
And you’re all set!