Deploy and Host MediaWiki on Railway

The MediaWiki software is used by tens of thousands of websites and thousands of companies and organisations. It powers Wikipedia and also this website. MediaWiki helps you collect and organise knowledge and make it available to people. It's powerful, multilingual, free and open, extensible, customisable, reliable.

Note: Deploying on a free plan may take up to 10 minutes to download and run all the containers

About Hosting MediaWiki

This template runs MediaWiki version 1.43 and can be deployed in 1-click with all the defaults. In that case you should use the following default Admin user credentials to login into your wiki:

Username: Admin
Password: Passsw0rd!

And once logged in - change your password on the Preferences page.

If you would like to change the credentials before deploying you have to update the following variables:

MW_ADMIN_USER - the username of the wiki admin user to be created, for example Admin
MW_ADMIN_PASS - the password for the admin user. The password must be 10 chars length min. and contain a number and a special character, i.e. Passsw0rd!

In addition, the wiki name (aka site-name) can be controlled by the following variable:

MW_SITE_NAME - the name of your wiki, can be any string, i.e. My Wiki

Common Use Cases

Knowledge Base
Collaborative Wiki portal
Blog
Semantic Database

Dependencies for mediawiki Hosting

Redis
MySQL

Deployment Dependencies

The template uses supercharged Taqasta image to run MediaWiki (https://github.com/WikiTeq/Taqasta). The image runs optimised and fine-tuned official version of MediaWiki, bundles over 130 free extensions and extra skins that can be easily enabled and configured using environment variables

The reason why Taqasta is used vs the regular MediaWiki docker image is not just because it's a supercharged version, but also because you can not install a regular MediaWiki docker image on Railways due to specific way of settings handling of MediaWiki (the regular setup requires you to download & add a generated settings file to a volume that you can not do on Railway)

Taqasta on the other hand provides automatic non-interactive setup behind the scenes removing the need to go through the initial MediaWiki setup wizard and thus not requiring one to upload any settings files to the volumes

This streamlined 1-click install process allows for quick deployments and smooth wiki admin experience compared to the regular images, which is especially important for Railway like platforms

Extensions enabled on this template:

ImageMap
InputBox
MathJax
Nuke
ParserFunctions
ReplaceText
Renameuser
Scribunto
SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi
Widgets
WikiEditor
CodeEditor
VisualEditor
Elastica
CirrusSearch
Echo
Cite
ExternalData
SemanticMediaWiki

You can enable more by updating the MW_LOAD_EXTENSIONS variable

The full list of extensions included can be seen at https://github.com/WikiTeq/Taqasta/blob/master/_sources/canasta/DockerSettings.php#L38

Skins enabled on this template:

Vector
Chameleon

You can enable more by updating the MW_LOAD_SKINS variable and set the default skin using MW_DEFAULT_SKIN variable

The full list of skins included can be seen at https://github.com/WikiTeq/Taqasta/blob/master/_sources/canasta/DockerSettings.php#L26

Additional capabilities

The template does not include Elasticsearch configuration, but the MediaWiki instance supports it out of the box. Most of the wikis should be fine without replacing the default search engine with Elasticsearch. However, for the ones looking for a better full-text search experience ElasticSearch can be added to the project using the following simple steps:

Create new ElasticSearch service deployment using elasticsearch:7.10.2 docker image tag
Add the following environment variables to the ElasticSearch instance

discovery.type=single-node
bootstrap.memory_lock=true
ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms128m -Xmx128m

On the MediaWiki service set the following variables:

MW_SEARCH_TYPE=CirrusSearch

Why Deploy mediawiki on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying mediawiki on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.