These instructions are a copy of:
http://ec2-54-171-74-136.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=wiki:how_to_install_doku_wiki_on_an_ec2_instance

Shell into you EC2 instance and cd to the root of the web storage (assumes a standard Amazon Linux instance)

ssh -i your_key_file.pem ec2-user@your_ec2_url
cd /var/www/html

Download the dokuwiki source base (this is just an example, chances are the actual URL is different. Figure this out yourself!)

wget https://download.dokuwiki.org/out/dokuwiki-c5525093cf2c4f47e2e5d2439fe13964.tgz

Unpack the thing

tar xvfz dokuwiki-c5525093cf2c4f47e2e5d2439fe13964.tgz

This will have generated a folder called 'dokuwiki'.

BEFORE YOU RUN INSTALL.PHP DO THIS!

Firstly, on Amazon Linux the web server runs as user 'apache'. At minimum you'll want to chgrp/chown the dokuwiki folder. You can check this by running ps aux | grep "http". Note that php's “get_current_user” seems to display something related to file permissions. TBH, I'm at a loss to know. I used it for testing and it returned 'ec2-user' until I chown'd the /var/www/html folder then it returned 'apache'. I'm not going down that rabbit hole.

chown -R apache dokuwiki
chgrp -R apache dokuwiki

If you do not do the above you'll get a ton of “permissions” problems (files and folders not writable) when you run install.php and you'll end up discovering exactly what I'm documenting here!!!

Then go to a browser and go to… http://ec2-instance-url/dokuwiki/install.php

Follow the instructions.

You're finished.

Using the shell remove the install.php folder for sanity's sake.