MediaWikiLite

The idea of MediaWikiLite is to allow the current MediaWiki codebase to run as a standalone server without requiring a database server or web-server. This forms the foundation for a number of alternative uses for the MediaWiki software in environments where the current LAMP architecture is too resource intensive.

• Personal wiki: Personal desktop wiki's are becoming very popular, but they do not use the MediaWiki parser, and making a fork of the parser code defeats the purpose.
• Embedded devices such as PDA's, iPod's and iPhone's can only run lite applications effectively and getting MediaWiki onto them would be very useful, especially if it's designed to synchronise with a web-based mirror when an internet connection is available.
• PeerPedia: A lite version of MediaWiki is required to make it a possible candidate for a client side wiki interface to a P2P article space.

As of MediaWiki version 1.13 the SQLite support is part of the main code-base. A running instance of MediaWiki 1.15.1 using the SQLite database can be seen at mediawikilite.org to test the current functionality.

MediaWikiLite as a portable folder structure

The first thing to do would be to get MediaWiki working with NanoWeb as a standalone executable running on SQLite. Ideally this would be able to run without requiring any installation into the system, so that each personal wiki would be a folder containing the wikis SQLite content and the executable codebase that could be run from memory stick and taken from machine to machine without altering the machine in any permanent way.

The folder structure of a typical MediaWikiLite would be something like this:

{"openlevels":5,"minExpandLevel":2}

• MyPersonalWiki

  • MediaWikiLite
    • php-5.2.3
    • nanoweb-1.2.0
    • mediawiki-1.16.1
      • extensions
        • DynamicPageList
        • TreeAndMenu
        • RecordAdmin
      • skins
        • OrganicDesign
        • Vector
        • MonoBook
      • LocalSettings.php
  • MyPersonalWiki.sqlite
  • Linux.sh
  • Win32.exe
  • MacOSX.sh

The portable wiki's folder contains its own web server and a MediaWiki codebase. In its root there is a startup program made for each OS which has platform specific means of running a compiled MediaWikiLite (or a standalone PHP interpreter). The folder also contains the .sqlite data file containing all the content of the wiki.

Current state

So far I've confirmed that the current version (1.15.3) of MediaWiki is able to run using the SQLite database and the NanoWeb PHP webserver on Ubuntu Linux. This is not running in a self-contained way though since PHP5 was installed the usual way and NanoWeb was installed from the Ubuntu APT repository. It does however illustrate that they are all able to operate happily together and furthermore article reads, edits, preference settings and special pages all came up very responsively. The next test is to do the same on Windows, I'm told that it's much less efficient on Windows due to the lack of PHP threading, but I'm hoping this problem only applies when trying to serve pages to multiple clients.

Replacing the Web Server

This may require FastCGI or a similar alternative because there is problems with functions such as header() which have no effect when running from command line but the function still exists so it can't be replaced. Unless there's some way of overriding built-in functions, this may not be possible.

NanoWeb looks like a good solution for the this. It's a web-server entirely written in PHP and comes with a number of modules such as a ReWrite clone. It can execute CGI scripts using a normal CGI module or a FastCGI module. Also the modules looks very easy to write so a module specifically designed to maintain a MediaWiki instance in memory could be written.

SQLite Installation

It's important to have this working with SQLite3 rather than 2 because version 3 supports more similar syntax for some SQL such as table creation than version 2. Aside from that, version 3 uses more compact files and executes more efficiently. SQLite3 works via PHP's PDO functions.

• To install SQLite3 on a Debian based system, use apt-get install php5-sqlite3.
• Check your phpinfo() to see if pdo_sqlite is listed, if not, try adding extension=php_pdo_sqlite.so into the dynamic extensions section of your php.ini
• Installer script needs to be patched to allow SQLite to work for a wiki installation since extensions are added from LocalSettings.php

See also

• www.mediawikilite.org - example of MediaWiki 1.15.1 installed with SQLite
• MW:SQLite
• Wikipedia:SQLite
• Extension talk:P2P.php
• Edit Conflict
• NanoWeb - webserver with rewrite and other modules written in PHP
• DevZone PHP socket server example
• LinuxFormatWiki PHP socket server example
• SQL as understood by SQLite
• Tutorial: Convert MySQL Tables to SQLite Tables
• mysql2sqlite.pl
• mysql2sqlite.sh
• Iterators in OOP
• PHP2EXE converter