DokuWiki on Debian, Ubuntu and derivative Distributions

A Debian package for DokuWiki exists in the official Debian repository and can be installed through the usual Debian tools (i.e. apt).

However, we generally do not recommend installing DokuWiki as a Debian package for several reasons:

• The package is outdated, using an older release of DokuWiki making it incompatible with many newer plugins
• The package uses a different directory structure, which can make problems with some plugins and may render some general documentation non applicable
• The package replaces some of DokuWiki's internal libraries with Debian packages versions which again can lead to incompatibilities

You can find details on the official package at these sources:

• Dokuwiki-package overview
• technical overview and news
• bug reports

Additional details can be found at the DokuWiki page on the Debian Wiki.

Instead of relying on the Debian package, it is recommended to simply install the webserver and PHP through the package manager and install DokuWiki from the sources.

This can be as easy as the following for a simple Apache mod_php setup:

1. Prepare the system, download and unpack the latest DokuWiki version:

   $> sudo apt update
   $> sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-xml php-json php-mbstring php-zip php-intl php-gd
   $> sudo systemctl restart apache2.service
   $> wget https://download.dokuwiki.org/src/dokuwiki/dokuwiki-stable.tgz
   $> tar xzvf dokuwiki-stable.tgz
   $> sudo mv dokuwiki-*a /var/www/html/dokuwiki
   $> sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/dokuwiki

2. Optional
   If you use a firewall, allow HTTP traffic. For the Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) the command would be this:

   sudo ufw allow 'Full'

3. Point your web browser to http://localhost/dokuwiki/install.php to configure your new DokuWiki installation.