We’re preparing a new update to the SWiK site and have a lot of further updates planned, and as we go along and change and introduce new things to SWiK and SWiK-Source it seems like it might be a good idea to have a discussion over email of ideas for how SWiK should run and what features we need to add.

I dunno if there is a lot of interest in people helping decide how swik should be run, but if you’d be interested send me an email at

PS: New update to the site coming in a bit …

SWiK Source – 1st Developer Release

This initial source code release is intended for a developer audience that is savvy enough to navigate complicated installation procedures and environment incompatibilities.

Due to bugs in Apache on Windows, SWiK is not capable of running perfectly on Windows and thus has not been tested for Windows at all: advised use is on Unix based servers, such as Ubuntu, Redhat/CentOS (the platform used in production) and Mac OS X (the platform used in development).

Future releases will include general maintenance of the code base to keep parity with the running service, and if there is sufficient interest or support in improving the source or the package, we will more forward on that front too.

Thing that often break in SWiK-Source, and why they break. The best way to diagnose problems is to check in the /logs directory. app.errors.log is a good place to look for application errors that occur on page load, app.ajax-errors.log is a good place to look for errors that occur through interactivity with ajax features.

SWiK fails to respond at all or returns a white page.

SWiK assumes a dedicated domain, such as swik.net, or no domain, for use in local host, see localhost install notes. The domain must not have a subdomain. Requests to SWiK are sent to apache through the virtual host setup, and then apache passes the request to swik.php, along with the raw query string. SWiK parses the query string and goes through each major page type, using an inverted control scheme to ask if a page wants to service the request.

• the requests aren’t being sent to swik: a virtual host setting is wrong, or a DNS issue
• an error has been triggered and swik source is configured to hide errors.
• an invalid swik domain has been used.

User and license pages fail to work properly

SWiK-Source does not encode the ’:’ entity in urls such as User:alex. On Unix in Apache 2.0, this is allowed, on Windows OR in Apache 1.0 this is not.

• switch to Apache 2.0
• do not host a swik-source wiki on windows
• fix the bug in apache on windows.

Save a wiki page -> no text appears.

This occurs because SWiK execs a ruby textile script to generate the description cache, and it may have difficulty .

• tmp file privileges are improperly set
• ruby is not installed or the path to it is incorrect

check both these things.

RSS feeds do not syndicate properly

RSS feeds are syndicated using a temporary file, and then parsed with MagpieRSS.

• tmp file privileges are improperly set
• the path to swik-configure is improperly set

Icon upload fails

Icon uploads use a two stage system. First the icon is persisted into the database; on the next request the icon is cached into a web directory. This is to ensure a single store for a multi-web-server environment, and cache icons for fast access.

• the swikIcons directory is not created or has bad privs for the server to write to.
• a libpng or libjpg library failure.

News regarding SWiK-Source.

SWiK Source is built on and integrated with the platform combination of PHP, MySQL, and Apache HTTPd. These applications are not packaged as part of the distribution, however SWiK Source requires these and other 3rd party open source components to run properly.

1. PHP 5.0 (see below for specific configure line)
2. Apache 2.0
3. MySQL 4.1
4. Ruby
5. Java
6. libxml
7. libjpg
8. libpng

Install these components yourself, or look down for how to compile these from source.

After you have completed installation of these components, continue to Setup and Deployment.

Step by step instructions for downloading and installing components

Note: These instructions assume you will make a directory called /usr/local/work and do your downloads and installations from there. If you deviate from this, please be careful to note instructions specific to this install directory.

Note: Many of these steps involve installing and configuring system level software, as such the steps assume that you are running as root. (“su -”, “sudo bash”, etc). If you are concerned about running as root, you can run much of the configuration without the privilege but please note steps that will have system level impact and do sudo accordingly.

Finally, all the steps assume you are setting your wiki up on a clean machine. If you have previous installations of components, you’ll have to adjust these instructions accordingly to make sure that your installations match the dependencies.

If you are using a package management system (such as yum on CentOS or Fedora) you can just make sure you’ve got the right packages installed, skipping all the following steps. For a CentOS 4.3 install, we used the following packages:

php-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-pear-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-ldap-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-mysql-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-mbstring-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-xml-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-imap-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-gd-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-xmlrpc-5.0.4-5.centos4
php-devel-5.0.4-5.centos4
httpd-suexec-2.0.52-22.ent.centos4
httpd-2.0.52-22.ent.centos4
httpd-devel-2.0.52-22.ent.centos4 
mysqlclient10-3.23.58-4.RHEL4.1 
mysql-4.1.20-1.RHEL4.1
mysql-server-4.1.20-1.RHEL4.1

On RedHat based systems, you can verify these are installed using ‘rpm -qa | grep [php|httpd|mysql]’

For installation on Ubuntu, here are the package matches discovered so far:

php-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php5
php-pear-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php-pear
php-ldap-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php5-ldap
php-mysql-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php5-mysql
php-mbstring-5.0.4-5.centos4 - - libapache2-mod-php5
php-xml-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php-xml-parser (?)
php-imap-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php5-imap
php-gd-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php5-gd
php-xmlrpc-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php5-xmlrpc
php-devel-5.0.4-5.centos4 - php5-dev (?)
httpd-suexec-2.0.52-22.ent.centos4 - - apache2-mpm-perchild (?)
httpd-2.0.52-22.ent.centos4 - - apache2 (?)
httpd-devel-2.0.52-22.ent.centos4 - apache2-utils (?)
mysqlclient10-3.23.58-4.RHEL4.1 - mysql-client
mysql-4.1.20-1.RHEL4.1 - mysql-common (?)
mysql-server-4.1.20-1.RHEL4.1 - mysql-server
libpng - libpng12-0
libjpg - libjpeg62
Java - sun-java5-jdk
Ruby - ruby

Step 1: Download

These are the primary versions which have been fully tested for SWiK Source. It should be fine to use new minor release, but some higher point releases may break.

• httpd-2.0.54.tar.bz2 – A new point release or slightly older release should be fine. There may be issues with 2.2 branch however. Distribution
• php-5.0.4.tar.bz2 – There may be issues with 5.1. branch, 4.x or early releases will not work at all. Distribution
• libxml2-2.6.17.tar.gz – ftp://ftp.xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxml2-2.6.17.tar.gz
• mysql-standard-4.1.12 – There may be issues with the 5.0 branch. Distributions

Step 2: Install MySQL

Run the installer. The installer puts everything in /usr/local/mysql-blahblah and links to it from /usr/local/mysql. Set a root password!, or not (it’s a lot easier to manipulate data when you don’t … sure is a lot more secure when you do).

Step 3: Install Apache2

cd /usr/local/work
tar xfj httpd-2.0.54.tar.bz2
cd httpd-2.0.54
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --enable-so --enable-rewrite=shared --with-mpm=prefork --enable-expires=shared
make && make install

Note: The httpd.conf will be configured later, when setting up and deploying the wiki.

Step 4: Build and Install libxml2

cd /usr/local/work
tar xfz libxml2-2.6.17.tar.gz
cd libxml2-2.6.17
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make && make install

Step 5: Download the Graphics Libraries

The JPEG and PNG libraries for working with images need to be downloaded.

 cd /usr/local/work
 curl -O http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
 curl -O http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.6rc5.tar.gz
 gnutar xzf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
 gnutar xzf libpng-1.2.6rc5.tar.gz

Step 6: Build and Install the JPEG library

• Build and install the jpeg-6b library:

 cd jpeg-6b
 ./configure
 make install
 make install-lib
 ranlib /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.a
 cd ..

Step 7: Build and Install the PNG library

• First copy the correct makefile for your environment (.darwin for osx, .linux for linux, etc).

  cd libpng-1.2.6rc5 cp scripts/makefile.your_environment ./Makefile

You need to make a few changes to the Makefile to point at your zlib locations before you build the library.

EDITOR_PROGRAM Makefile

• Find the following lines:

 # Where the zlib library and include files are located 
 #ZLIBLIB=/usr/local/lib 
 #ZLIBINC=/usr/local/include
 ZLIBLIB=../zlib
 ZLIBINC=../zlib

• Reverse the comments to this:

 # Where the zlib library and include files are located 
 ZLIBLIB=/usr/local/lib 
 ZLIBINC=/usr/local/include
 #ZLIBLIB=../zlib
 #ZLIBINC=../zlib

• Now build and install the PNG library:

  make make install ranlib /usr/local/lib/libpng.a

Step 8: Build PHP

 cd /usr/local/work
 tar xfj ~/php-5.0.4.tar.bz2
 cd php-5.0.4
 ./configure  --prefix=/usr/local/php5 
   --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs
   --with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql
   --enable-mbstring --enable-mbregex --enable-soap --with-libxml2=/usr/local
   --with-zlib=/usr --with-iconv --with-gd --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/work/jpeg-6b
 make && make install

Note: php.ini will be setup later.

If you successfully completed these steps, you’ve now got the platform for SWiK Source to run. Please continue to the next step: SWiK Source Setup and Deployment.