DokuWiki on a hosted server

If you want to install DokuWiki on rented webspace this document has some useful tips.

Have a look at the Screencast for this type of installation.

You should first follow the basic instructions, eg:

• Extract the tarball somewhere on your harddisk
• upload all the files within the dokuwiki-YYYY-MM-DD directory to your webspace
• open http://www.yourserver.com/path/to/dokuwiki/install.php
• you probably will get some permission errors, fix them

If you fixed any permission problems through chmod, it is most probably because the webserver runs as different user than the account you use to upload your files. If the group differs as well then the webserver (which runs the DokuWiki application) will create files you will not be able to delete as your normal (FTP) user. To avoid this you need to relax permissions setting through the fmode and dmode settings.

For fixing files with already wrong permissions you can either ask your hosting support for help or use the fixperms.php script.
For changing a whole directory with subfolders, FileZilla v. 3 (In December 2006 it is still Beta, but works fine for this task) supports now 'recursive settings' of permissions for directories as well as files, or only directories or only files.

Some hosting providers do not provide a working sendmail on their servers. Instead, a separate machine runs SMTP and requires authentication. In this scenario, DokuWiki's email features, including allowing new users to register and receive a password, will not work.

It is recommended to use this SwiftMail plugin to configure DokuWiki with an external SMTP server then.

• A list of host-specific information is available at the main DokuWiki installation page