Setup DokuWiki on Free Hosting in < 15 Minutes

It's Christmas and everybody gets presents. And so do you :-) . This post will explain how to get 100% free PHP hosting, including 1.5GB disk space and 100GB free traffic. It also explains how to use a simple script I wrote to download and setup DokuWiki with just a few clicks.

The mentioned Script is called dokuwiki-downloader.php and can be downloaded here. It's just a single PHP script that can be uploaded to any web host. When run in the browser it will automatically download the DokuWiki tarball, extract it and run the DokuWiki installer. It couldn't be any simpler or faster.

Just follow the steps below. Each step has an accompanying screen shot, be sure to check them as well.

Update: CD-MaN reports 000webhost.com trying to install malware. What a PITA. Please don't use them. I updated the screenshots and description for using byethost.com instead.

Go to byethost.com and sign up for their free web hosting plan – yes it's really free.
Fill in the needed details for your account. The username you provide here, will be a sub domain under a byethost owned top level domain. I used splitbrain as my user name.
After answering a CAPTCHA your account will be created and you get an account overview. There's lots of useful stuff here, including the complete URL where we will install the Wiki. Mine is splitbrain.byethost17.com. Continue to the “Vista Panel” and select the “File Manager” there.
Here you first need to change the permissions of the web root. Select the public_html folder and click “Chmod”.
In the next screen tick all permissions and confirm with the green check mark.
Back on the home screen, click the public_html to open it.
Inside the public_html folder press the “upload” button.
If you haven't done yet, download the DokuWiki Downloader Script and upload it through the “Web File Manager”.
Now it's time to go to your new site and run the just uploaded script in the browser. In my case the URL was http://splitbrain.byethost.com/dokuwiki-downloader.php.
The downloader script will now guide you through multiple steps.
First the current DokuWiki release .tgz is downloaded.
Then the .tgz is extracted.
Finally the downloader script and the .tgz are deleted again and you are guided to the standard DokuWiki installer.
Just fill in some basic data and press “save”.
That's it – you successfully installed DokuWiki in less than 15 minutes

I hope you enjoy your DokuWiki and Merry Christmas to all of you.

PS: I don't have much experience with the suggested hoster. They seem to work fine and should be more than enough for personal or small work group wikis. I wouldn't recommend a free service for enterprises, though.

PPS: The script sets very relaxed (777) file permissions to make sure you can modify, upgrade or delete files via FTP later. DokuWiki's defaults are less permissive. To avoid problems later, I recommend changing the fmode and dmode settings to 0666 and 0777 respectively in the DokuWiki configuration manager. Since all users' web server processes on the host run as the same user, there isn't much security to gain from restricting the modes.

Tags:: dokuwiki,; hosting,; download,; install

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Posted on Wednesday, December the 24th 2008 (14 months ago).

Nice, just tried it. Works without problems. :-)

2008-12-25 00:58:15

Tblue

I've thought about doing this for regular distributions. Instead of having a zipped/tarballed file stored on the server and just allow the user, via a script, download the files individually. Perhaps it is easier if you don't have many files unlike Dokuwiki. In the way of downloading each file, you could update each file easily and the downloader will get get the most up-to-date files. Security issues are more easily contained.

Now that you've wrote one, I'm probably going to go ahead and write one myself. At least I'm not the only one in the tubes to have thought the same? How'd you think of it?

2008-12-26 04:36:57

Jacroe

Jacroe, I'm not sure if I understood you correctly. But transferring each file on its own instead of downloading a tarball would be *much* slower. The size of the data would be bigger (because of no compression) and the overhead of the separate HTTP connections would be considerable because there are so many small files involved.

Or are you talking about updating? For updating this might work but you have to keep in mind that the solution above is simple because you only need to make sure the top directory is writable. For updating you need to check that all files are writable - probably not the case for most installations. Also what happens if your updater crashes in the middle? Then some files might be updated while others are not, leaving your install in an inconsistent state.

That being said, if you really want to write an update script for DokuWiki it would be welcome. But please join the mailing list to discuss this a bit further first.

2008-12-26 12:13:49

Andi

My 2c: I just tried to sign up for 000webhost.com, given that you've recommended it, however they seem to be somewhat shady:

At the last step they require you to download an run an executable which 31 (!) AV product detect as malware: http://www.virustotal.com/anal … 037965faa9

(Their blah-blah about "IP Based confirmation" doesn't make any sense either, since my IP changes after each reboot for example, being on an DSL line). Take care, and scan your computer with an AV just in case.

2009-01-02 10:07:37

Cd-MaN

Uhm can anyone confirm this? When I tried it I had not to download anything. Did you maybe click on some shady banner?

2009-01-02 14:55:06

Andi

I did a little more research into the topic, and it seems almost 100% now that they are knowingly distributing malware. See my findings at: http://hype-free.blogspot.com/ … lware.html

2009-01-03 18:10:19

Cd-MaN

Cd-Man, thanks for investigating. That really sucks. I looked for alternatives and found byethost.com. Hopefully they will last longer ;-). Screenshots and descriptions were updated.

2009-01-04 14:16:38

Andi

My pleasure. I used byethost in the past and the seem OK (of course that's not to say that they won't go rouge :-D).

Keep up the great work with DokuWiki.

Best regards.

2009-01-05 07:21:54

Cd-MaN

I made a account at byethost.
I experienced "PHP function readfile is not available. Maybe your hosting provider disabled it for some reason?" on running Install.php.
How can i fix it?

2009-02-10 05:08:23

Yoo

Yoo, that's the problem with free hosts. They can change their services whenever they want. Looks like you need to look for a different hoster then.

You could also mail them and try to convince them to reenable the function. Maybe point them to this article.

2009-02-10 10:21:04

Andi

Thanks, Andi! Your script is very handy!

BTW, I tried it today with byethost account and downloader as well as installer worked without a claim.

2009-03-29 13:10:52

Nikita Melnichenko

Nice work! Without problems, but... how can I update dokuwiki to the last version? I tried to upload with byethost's ftp tool, but I made something wrong beccause the wiki is lost... :( I have to install it again.
Thanks for the help,
Marcelo

2009-08-28 14:22:46

marcelo

The link for the file
http://dev.splitbrain.org/view … loader.php

give me a 403 error !

(by chance i have one copy of it somewhere :!)

2009-10-20 21:22:54

jm_zz

GREAT JOB !

Now can this (or a path of this) be used for upgrades ? I used the original file first and than experienced a change in $VERSION = 'rc2009-12-02'; to $VERSION = '2009-12-25';. Worked fine for extraction but than as installation is not possible twice I had to erase
* {DOCUMENT_ROOT}//conf/local.php
* {DOCUMENT_ROOT}//conf/users.auth.php
* {DOCUMENT_ROOT}//conf/acl.auth.php
to install again but... It did not work, according to {DOCUMENT_ROOT}//VERSION.

I also tried to erase {DOCUMENT_ROOT}//VERSION but to no avail (it was'nt re-generated).

Any idea for an upgrading scritp ?

PS : byethost.com is fine for me : they do ask for a google add insertion but do not add it themselves, at least not the first days...

2010-01-03 22:42:34

neeteex