Wikispooks:Site Backup

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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 chance this information will not be lost.

Content of the 'Backups' directory

Be sure to check the dates in the Backups list box on the right. You will probably want site-latest.zip, since this will always be the most up to date.

site-YYYY-MM-DD.zip - a ZIP file of the entire site wiki

Overview

To host Wikispooks on your machine, you will need:

Some knowledge of running a webserver
Some knowledge of the Mediawiki software
A site-backup set - The necessary backup files are listed above and here.
A computer with at least 5 Gb of free disk space that runs a web server, including
- PHP v 5.3.3 +
- MySQL v 5.1.73 +
- Lua v 5.1.5 +

N.B. Either WampServer or Xampp provides the web-server software you need to run the Wikispooks site locally.

Setting up and running a Copy Of The Site

The backups enable you to import all the files, images and text-content of the site into 'Mediawiki'.

The 'LocalSettings.php' file

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.

Getting the wikispooks site content and files/images into Mediawiki

Proceed as follows:

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 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

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.

Notes

The following items are not included in the backup:

'ISGP Archive' - the full ISGP archive is available from https://wikispooks.com/ISGP/ISGP_site_backup.zip (136MB)
The 'Anon Uploads Form'
'ACH sytem'
'Piwik stats'
Wikileaks 'Cablegate Mirror'
Wikileaks 'Torrents'

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.