XWiki

XWiki is an open-source enterprise-ready wiki written in Java, with a focus on extensibility.

Installation

Feel free to follow along on the XWiki Installation Guide^{[dead link 2024-01-13 ⓘ]}. These instructions assume you will be using Tomcat and PostgreSQL. It should not be too difficult to apply these guidelines to other combinations.

• Install PostgreSQL.
• For easier PostgreSQL administration, install phpPgAdmin.
• Install tomcat. (Do not forget tomcat-native.)
• Download the XWiki WAR file.
• Rename the WAR file to xwiki.
• Move the WAR file into the /var/lib/tomcatn/webapps directory.
• Tomcat should automatically extract the WAR file. If not, restart Tomcat.
• At this point, you may find that a data directory has appeared in /var/lib/tomcatn/webapps. Delete it.
• As root:

# cd /var/lib/tomcatn
# mkdir data
# chown tomcatn:tomcatn data

• Inside the /var/lib/tomcatn/webapps/xwiki/WEB-INF directory:
  • Open the xwiki.properties file and alter the environment.permanentDirectory field to read /var/lib/tomcatn/data/xwiki.
  • Open the hibernate.cfg.xml file and:
    • Comment-out the section entitled "Configuration for the default database".
    • Uncomment the section entitled "PostgreSQL Configuration".
    • Modify the database name (in connection.url), username, and password as desired.
• Create a role and database in PostgreSQL to match the hibernate configuration.
• Install postgresql-jdbc^AUR from the Arch User Repository.
• As root:

# cd /usr/share/java/tomcatn
# ln -s /usr/share/java/postgresql-jdbc/postgresql-jdbc41.jar

• Restart tomcatn.service.
• Launch the XWiki application by clicking on /xwiki in Tomcat Manager.
• The XWiki is started with XWiki Wizard Guide to finish your configuration.

Nginx proxy configuration - Solution 1

The official Nginx guide for XWiki is not correct. There is an alternative solution which works for XWiki.

• Configure nginx site xwiki configuration file.

/etc/nginx/sites-available/xwiki

server {
  listen 80 default_server;
  server_name xwiki.<domain-name>;
  return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
  listen [::]:443 ssl;
  listen 443 ssl;

  server_name xwiki.<domain-name>;

  # SSL Certificate section
  ssl_certificate ...
  ssl_certificate_key ...

  location = / {
    return 301 https://$host/xwiki;
  }

  location /xwiki {
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header   Host      $host;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header   Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header   Connection 'upgrade';
    proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Host $host;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Server $host;
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:8080/xwiki;
  }
}

• Activate a server block in sites-enabled directory ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/xwiki /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/xwiki.
• Restart Nginx.

Nginx proxy configuration - Solution 2

I found that instructing nginx to proxy to http://localhost:8080/xwiki/ did not work: the generated URLs were incorrect. Contrary to what is indicated in the XWiki documentation^{[dead link 2024-01-13 ⓘ]}, I could not make the URLs correct through the use of HTTP headers.

The only solution I'm aware of so far is to create a new Host element in Tomcat's server.xml file:

• Duplicate the existing Host element and alter the name attribute to read xwiki.
• Alter the appBase attribute to read /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps-xwiki.
• Move the xwiki application from /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/xwiki to /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps-xwiki/ROOT.
• Restart Tomcat
• Add xwiki as an alias to localhost in /etc/hosts (add it to the end of the 127.0.0.1 line).
• Instruct Nginx to proxy to http://xwiki:8080/ instead.