Wikispooks:Site Backup

Introduction

Wikispooks content renders it less than welcome to powerful interests which may put it at greater than average risk of disruption - legal or otherwise.

A full site backup is therefore available to ensure that, should the site - for whatever reason - become unavailable, a reasonably up to date version of it will be held by many people in multiple locations such that it can avoid the 'black-hole' fate that has overtaken other dissident sites - notably Joe Vialls. It should also demonstrate that the site is genuinely open, crowd sourced and free from proprietorial interest and control, other than to police its original editorial policy and project purposes (See the project pages for full information).

With a modicum of technical know-how the backups can be restored to a local machine or simply archived as an insurance against its present iteration disappearing. Anyone setting up a local site can ask to have it configured to automatically synchronise with the main site so that the local copy is always current - email admin[at]wikispooks.org, encrypted with this key, for the necessary credentials etc. - NB credentials will only be sent by encrypted email.

Backup files

There are two zip files which which together contain a complete site backup (click to download):

1. wsdirs.zip (@ 2.8Gb) - The entire directory structure and files on the Wikispooks web server. This file is updated on an ad-hoc basis - hopefully at least one per month.
2. ws.zip (@ 185Mb) - This zip contains the following 3 files:
   1. readme.txt - Instructions (containing much the same information as this page)
   2. ConfigParams.txt - Configuration parameters for appending to the 'LocalSetting.php' file generated by the Mediawiki install procedure.
   3. ws.sql - The Wikispooks MySQL database dump

General

• The wsdirs.zip file contains everything needed to reconstitute the Wikispooks site on any web server running both php and MySQL. The main Wikispooks machine runs the Apache web server. There will be a number of Apache config parameters that need setting in order for 'pretty urls' to work properly. Full details can be found on the Mediawiki web site. It should be possible to run the site using other web servers but it has only been tested with Apache 2.2.15
• The ws.sql file will restore the Wikispooks MySQL database and can be used to set up a basic installation if you already have Mediawiki installed. However, to function properly, many Mediawiki extensions will also need to be installed. It does NOT include any pdf, image or other files needed for a fully functioning version of the site.

Overview of the Wikispooks 'Mediawiki' software configuration

• Current installed version 1.16.3
• There are many Mediawiki extensions in use on the site. In particular 'Widgets', 'Semantic MediaWiki', 'Semantic Forms', 'News', 'DynamicPageList' and 'Category Tree' are fundamental to the proper display and operation of the site. All the software extensions are included in the wsdirs.zip file

System requirements for local site operation

• A smokey machine running a web server (The main Wikispooks site runs Apache v2.2.15)
• php v 5.0 +
• MySQL v 5.0 +
• at least 5 Gb of free disk space

Note: both WampServer and Xampp (Google them) provide all the server software needed to run the Wikispooks site locally.

Basic installation instructions

• Unpack wsdirs.zip to a web server root directory. Note: The file unpacks to a single directory called 'httpdocs'. This is the server root of the current Wikispooks machine. Either make it your server root or copy its contents to your server root.
• Create a new blank MySQL database
• Create a dedicated database user with full privilages; note this user name and password.
• import the ws.sql database dump into the new database. Note: The file is too large for a default configuration of phpMyAdmin to handle. It is therefore recommended that the MySQL command line be used - something like:

$ mysql -u username -p password -h localhost data-base-name < ws.sql

Important

In order to safeguard the main site database credentials, there is no 'LocalSettings.php' file included in the backup. To get your system working, you will need to go through the standard Mediawiki setup procedure which should initiate when you access the /site-root/w/config' directory with a browser. Successful completion of this prodedure will create a '.../w/LocalSettings.php' file. This is a basic configuration file which will NOT include any of the required extension and other configuration parameters. To complete the configuration and install the required extensions proceed as follows:

1. Open 'LocalSettings.php' in a text editor.
2. Copy and paste the entire contents of the 'configParams.txt' file to the end of the 'LocalSettings.php' file
3. Save the modified file

Notes

• The Wikispooks installation is set up such that none of its media files (ie pdf's, doc's jpg's avi's etc) are held in the MySQL database. The database only contains pointers to these files. The files themselves are held in the directory structure below 'server root/w/images' (a bit counter-intuitive, but there you go)
• The 'Piwik stats' and 'Cablegate mirror' sub menus will not work. Not included in the backup.
• The 'Anon Uploads Form' option in the left-hand menu will not work. Not included in backup.
• Many of the in-text links (especially on 'Category:IFrame' pages) will take you to the master Wikispooks site. This is because urls which ought to be coded as relative, have in fact been entered as absolute urls. It is easy to manually change any such url's in your browser address-bar at run time (simply replace 'https://wikispooks.com/' with 'localhost/your_root_dir_name/'. This issue will be addressed at source as and when.

• Please post any suggestions, queries etc. to this discussion page