DokuWiki is a very widely used application, allowing you to set up - you guessed it - a wiki on your website.

In fact, it's the wiki being used right here. :)

One of its great assets is that it stores its data in text files, meaning you don't need a MySQL database to run it.

You have a choice here. For “neatness'” sake, such applications are generally placed in a folder within the www sub-domain (www.example.com/wiki) or in a specific sub-domain of its own (wiki.example.com).

Easy! Just make sure the you create a specific folder for the store (as in www.example.com/wiki)

Two things to do:

• Configure your server for this sub-domain, as explained in this tutorial.
• Configure your sub-domain to point to the server you have just configured, as explained in this tutorial.

This is the option we will be using in the rest of the tutorial.

To begin with, we need to download it. At the time of writing, the latest version was 1.0.14.

Nothing beats the official site to get the intial compressed file. I therefore recommend this link.

Now that you've downloaded the file onto your favorite hard drive, decompress it. You now have a folder (let's rename it wiki) containing all of the DokuWiki files.

Launch your favorite FTP client (we recommend FileZilla) and log in as admin onto your server. Then, open the folder corresponding to the VirtualHost you had initially defined.

In our example, the path of the FTP would therefore be:

/srv/d_my-gandai-ai/www/wiki.example.com/htdocs

…that is, unless you've changed the initial configuration of the web files. If that's the case, however, I'm assuming you knew what you were doing. :)

At this stage, we can upload the DokuWiki files onto your server.

• If you created a wiki.example.com kind of virtual host, you will wantDokuWiki to come up as the front page (i.e. not within a folder in the sub-domain) and you should therefore upload the content of the wiki folder into the htdocs folder of your sub-domain.
• If you're not a fan of sub-domains and prefer a good old example.com/wiki, then you need to upload the complete folder into htdocs (or another folder if you want).

For DokuWiki to configure properly, certain folders and files will need specific rights. In most cases, to change these rights with your FTP client, all you need to do is right-click on the file concerned and chose the right term in the menu (could be Rights, CHMOD, Properties…). Supposing you were using FileZilla, this is how the client would operate:

Right-click the concerned file and select “File Attributes…”. The window that has just opened gives you two different methods to change the file rights: boxes to tick and numeric values.

The point of the tutorial not being to teach the numeric values of rights in UNIX, let's just say you can simply replace the numeric value by 777.

In addition to the wiki folder itself, the following files and folders will need its rights changed:

/conf
/data 
/data/attic
/data/cache
/data/index
/data/media
/data/meta
/data/locks
/data/pages

Using your web browser, open the DokuWiki folder's install.php page, which, in our example, would therefore be wiki.example.com/install.php

If DokuWiki was properly uploaded and the folder rights properly attributed as explained above, you should now be greeted by a list of fields in need of filling-in!

Wiki Name: Well that's entirely up to you.

Enable ACL (recommended): You can leave the default option ticked.

Superuser: Choose a name for the wiki's 'administrator' account.

Full name: The full name of the account holder.

E-Mail: His or her e-mail.

Password: A password associated to this account…

once again: …which you need to confirm.

Initial ACL policy: Choose the “openness” of your wiki among the options you are given.

You're done already!! Should you want more information on how to configure your DokuWiki, please visit DokuWiki's official documentation.