Wikispooks:Site Backup

Page overhaul in progress - aim to complete 4-June-15 --Peter P (talk) 20:31, 3 June 2015 (IST)

Even if you are a casual reader and not a contributor to the wikispooks project, you are encouraged to download and keep a backup copy of the site (~2.9Gb) in case it goes offline for any reason. The site is open licenced so you are free to copy it's content and publish it elsewhere, either as an exact mirror or as part of another website. The more people around the world who keep a backup, the better the odds that the site content will not be lost.

Content of the 'Backups' directory

Available files are listed in the Backup files list box on the right. The main site backup files are in the form site-YYYY-MM-DD.zip indicating the date taken and there will usually be at least 4 generations of them. The file site-latest.zip links to the most up-to-date of the site backups.
wikileaks.zip contains Bit-Torrent files for the entire wikileaks site between it's original launch in 2006 to February 2010.
From time-to-time there may be other Wikispooks project-related files made available for download.

Notes

The following items are not included in the main site backup files:

The 'Anon Uploads Form'
'Piwik stats'
Wikileaks 'Torrents' - Separate download here

Setting up and running a Copy Of The Site

A single main site backup file contains everything needed to run a copy or mirror of the Wikispooks site on a suitably configured web server. Apache running on Linux is the web server used by Wikispooks and assumed in these instructions although NginX, IIS and other web servers can be configured to run Mediawiki.

N.B. Either WampServer or Xampp provides all the Apache web-server software need to run the Wikispooks site locally on either a Linux or Windows machine.

Overview

Set up your web server; create a blank MySQL database; download site-latest.zip to your server root and unpack it; import file path-to-server-root/backups/ws.sql into your blank MySQL database; edit path-to-server-root/w/LocalSettings.php and enter your database name and user credentials; navigate to your web-server root from your web browser to browse your local copy of Wikispooks.

Web server directives

Pretty urls are required for full site functionality. Add the following to the bottom of your server or virtual server config file:

Alias /wiki path-to-server root/w/index.php.

Apache config files are usually located at /etc/httpd/.

for correct display of the Site backups list box. Add the following to your server config file:

<Directory "path-to-server-root/backups"> Options +Indexes IndexIgnore .. header.html HeaderName header.html IndexOptions FancyIndexing SuppressDescription SuppressLastModified </Directory>

You may have to tweek a few directory permission for the site to run smoothly. In particular the following require user (Usually Apache) write permissions:

path-to-server-root/w/cache/

path-to-server-root/w/images/

Download and unpack site backup

Unzip site-latest.zip in the web server root directory. This will generate many directories and files in and under the web server root.

Import the Wikispooks content into your database

Import path-to-server-root/backups/ws.sql into the new database.

N.B. The file is too large for a default configuration of phpMyAdmin to handle. Try a MySQL command for this, e.g.

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

Error reporting

If things don't go smoothly, adding the following lines to LocalSettings.php will give you some diagnostic output:

$wgShowExceptionDetails = true;

$wgShowSQLErrors = 1;

It's recommended to take these lines out once things are working OK.

Finishing Touches

The procedure as explained above is sufficient for the database and all the files. There will be a number of Apache config parameters that need setting in order for 'pretty URLs' to work properly, such as a .htaccess file. Full details can be found on the Mediawiki web site.

Running A Live Site Mirror

If you have interest and resources to set up a realtime site mirror on your server, you are encouraged to do so. We may also be able to provide you with some technical assistance if needed. Requests for help setting up realtime mirrors should be addressed to admin[at]wikispooks.org and encrypted with this key.

Known Issues

You may experience difficulty with file permissions on the images directory during the install process. In this case, you may need to change these permissions. For more details, see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Security#Upload_security

Some of the in-text links (especially on 'Category:IFrame' pages) may 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 URLs 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.