Installation using Debian (.DEB) packages

Version 154.1 by Thomas Mortagne on 2019/12/27

This distribution allows installing XWiki and every component needed for a production instance automatically.

This method works for all Debian-based linux distribution. Feel free to use the User Forum to report issues, or discuss about it.

APT Configuration

First, you have to configure your package manager in order to use xwiki's repository. This can be done simply, using this command:

wget -q "https://maven.xwiki.org/public.gpg" -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo wget "https://maven.xwiki.org/stable/xwiki-stable.list" -P /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

Note that there is several repositories you can choose (as alternatives to the stable one you have in the previous example):

Now you can update the packages database to read the data from this repository.

sudo apt-get update

I'll assume you're using APT tools. You can use Aptitude as well.

Now you can make a little search to see what this repo offers.

apt-cache search xwiki

It shows the following packages (the exact list depends on the version the repository contains):

  • xwiki-common - XWiki, you can install this if you want to take care yourself of the database and application server
  • xwiki-mysql-common - XWiki MySQL common package, you can install this if you want to take care yourself of the application server
  • xwiki-pgsql-common - XWiki PostgreSQL common package, you can install this if you want to take care yourself of the application server
  • xwiki-tomcat8-common - XWiki Tomcat 8 common package, you can install this if you want to take care yourself of the database link
  • xwiki-tomcat9-common - XWiki Tomcat 9 common package, you can install this if you want to take care yourself of the database link
  • xwiki-tomcat8-mysql - XWiki Tomcat 8/MySQL based package
  • xwiki-tomcat9-mysql - XWiki Tomcat 9/MySQL based package
  • xwiki-tomcat8-pgsql - XWiki Tomcat 8/PostgreSQL
  • xwiki-tomcat9-pgsql - XWiki Tomcat 9/PostgreSQL
  • xwiki-solr-data - A pre configured Solr core to be used to setup a standalone instance of Solr for XWiki

Plus legacy packages from older versions of XWiki like xwiki-enterprise-* packages or for unsupported versions of Tomcat.

xwiki-enterprise-* packages were deprecated as of 9.4. Installations requiring those packages will appear to have stopped updating at version 9.4. Install the corresponding xwiki-* package to update to the latest version. (For example, if you were relying on the xwiki-enterprise-tomcat8-mysql package, you will now need to install the xwiki-tomcat8-mysql package.)

According to selection, package manager will install all necessary dependencies (application server, database, Java runtime). If you haven't installed these packages before, package manager can ask additional info from you.

  On Ubuntu you will need universe repository to install Tomcat packages. It's generally enabled by default.

Java 8

XWiki require Java 8 since XWiki 8.1, OpenJDK 8 will be automatically installed as dependency on recent distributions.

In some cases Java 11 might be installed and activated by default. If you have both Java version (8 and 11) in your distribution, you can modify /etc/default/tomcat8 to point to a java8 JAVA_HOME

For some older distributions the problem is that Ubuntu and Debian did not bothered put OpenJDK 8 on older but still supported distributions default repositories (for example Ubuntu 14.04 or Debian Wheezy/Jessie). For those you will have to make sure there is some repository with it so that Java 8 is installed as a package so that XWiki find it as dependency.

Also if you have several versions of Java installed you might need to explicitly tell Tomcat which one to use after the install. See Tomcat Usability section.

Here is a few helpers for specific distributions:

Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr), Debian < 9

Complete Installation

Most Debian distributions provide a Tomcat package with a pretty low Memory setting by default (128MB) and this need to be increased for XWiki to fully work. See Tomcat Usability section for more details.

Using MySQL

You only have to run this command to install all the interesting components.

sudo apt-get install xwiki-tomcat9-mysql

This package depends on xwiki-common, xwiki-tomcat9-common, xwiki-mysql-common, mysql-server, tomcat9 and libmysql-java. You might have to select a different version of Tomcat depending on what's available in your system repository.

During the installation, you may have some questions from dbconfig, in charge of the configuration of the database. Don't confuse it with the MySQL root password prompt, which beg you to put a password for the superuser.
DBconfig prompt is about the configuration of xwiki and mysql. If you haven't any mysql already installed and you aren't familiar with it, you should let dbconfig handle this.

DBconfig is then asking you for the mysql root password (you may have entered before). Then, you can choose the password for the "xwiki" mysql user. This user will be used to connect from XWiki application. Choose it wisely, but you don't have to pay a lot of attention to it, because after that, dbconfig is configuring XWiki automatically with these credentials.

The installation now ends, with the automatic start of tomcat daemon ("Starting Tomcat servlet engine tomcat9      [OK]").

Note that your wiki is absolutely empty, like a WAR installation. Distribution Wizard will take care of the rest.

Using PostgreSQL

It's as simple as the MySQL installation, you only need to choose the right virtual package.

sudo apt-get install xwiki-tomcat9-pgsql

After you've made sure to update the memory settings (see below), you can now point your favorite browser to the following URL to use your wiki: http://localhost:8080/xwiki

PostgreSQL is slightly different than MySQL in the handling of databases and in the manual configuration, but everything should work on the first try.

Security settings

  1. Open /etc/xwiki/xwiki.cfg file and change lines:

    ...
    #-# Cookie encryption keys. You SHOULD replace these values with any random string,
    #-# as long as the length is the same.
    xwiki.authentication.validationKey=your1stkeyhere
    xwiki.authentication.encryptionKey=your2ndkeyhere
    ...
  2. If you need, add password to the built-in superadmin account, by changing line:

    ...
    #-# Enable to allow superadmin. It is disabled by default as this could be a
    #-# security breach if it were set and you forgot about it. Should only be enabled
    #-# for recovering the Wiki when the rights are completely messed.
    xwiki.superadminpassword=yourpassword
    ...

Tomcat Usability

You can find various generic advices and troubleshooting related to Tomcat on https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Installation/InstallationWAR/InstallationTomcat/.

Java Version

Make sure Tomcat is executed with the right Java version.

This is usually indicated in the file /etc/default/tomcat8 (or /etc/default/tomcat7 for Tomcat 7, etc).

Memory

The default Tomcat memory setup is too low for XWiki's needs.

You can change it in the file /etc/default/tomcat8 (or /etc/default/tomcat7 for Tomcat 7, etc).

Modify the property JAVA_OPTS. For example:

JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx1024m"

You should check the Memory settings we recommend.

/dev/urandom

In most Debian-based systems the default random implementation is /dev/random which can be very slow. /dev/urandom is much faster and it's fine for XWiki's needs so you should use it when possible:

  • edit /etc/default/tomcat8 file and add
JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS} -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom"

Concluding Step

At this point your wiki is empty, i.e it doesn't contain any wiki page. Since applications in XWiki are done in wiki pages so you also don't need any application available (e.g. Blog, User Directory, User Profiles, etc). In addition, your wiki doesn't contain any user.

Thus the final step is to fill your Wiki with some initial content (i.e. wiki pages).

This is the job of the Distribution Wizard which automatically starts when you are browsing your new XWiki instance for the first time.

The default distribution is a fully configured wiki that you can use as a starting point for creating your own wiki content. It provides the following:

Installing without internet connection

XIP Package

A XIP package is available. It contains an offline extension repository with all the extensions making the Standard Flavor.

This is actually a zip file containing the required XWiki extensions for both the main wiki and subwikis, in the same format as the one of the local extensions repository. It allows the Distribution Wizard to find the extensions locally instead of getting them online and is thus suited for offline installations of XWiki.

  • download it (use the exact same version of the XIP package as the version of XWiki you have)
  • Unzip it (rename it to .zip if your zip tool does not recognize it) in the folder <permanentdirectory>/extension/repository (if you get complains about already existing files don't overwrite them)
  • Make sure the user running XWiki has the permissions to write to these unzipped files
  • Restart XWiki if it was running
  • Resume standard installation, this time it will find the flavor locally

XWiki doesn't offer XIP packages for Contrib Extensions. However it's possible to generate these XIPs.

Other methods

Several options:

Extension Repositories

XWiki performs some checks at startup and even at runtime and tries to connects to remote Extension repositories. This will not cause any problem if you're offline but you'll get some error logs. You may want to disable Extension repositories by editing your xwiki.properties config file and adding the following empty property (make sure that this is the only property defined with the name):

extension.repositories=

Uninstallation

If you want to remove XWiki from your system, you only have to uninstall the package you've installed at the beginning of this documentation. For example:

sudo apt-get --purge remove xwiki-common

Attention, these commands do not remove MySQL/PostgreSQL nor Tomcat from your system. To do so, if you don't use these applications for another purpose, you can make some cleaning with

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

Troubleshooting

Tomcat

See Tomcat Installation for generic Tomcat related issues.

Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

At time of writing the version of Tomcat provide by Ubuntu 16.04 repository has a serious classloader related bug which makes impossible to use code macro or write Python scripts in XWiki. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tomcat8/+bug/1644144 and https://forum.xwiki.org/t/code-macro-requirements/909/20 for some more detailed explanations and workarounds.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nacc/tomcat8v2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tomcat8=8.0.32-1ubuntu1.3~ppa2
sudo apt-get install tomcat8-common=8.0.32-1ubuntu1.3~ppa2
sudo apt-get install libtomcat8-java=8.0.32-1ubuntu1.3~ppa2
sudo service tomcat8 restart

Don't hesitate to click on "This bug affects me" on launchpad page if it's still not fixed, might help speeding up things...

MySQL

See MySQL Installation for generic MySQL related issues.

PostgreSQL

See PostgreSQL Installation for generic PostgreSQL related issues.

Bad version of PostgreSQL driver on Debian Wheezy

The version of the PostgreSQL driver on Debian Wheezy is the 9.1 (at least when writing those lines) which does not work well with XWiki. You will have to upgrade it.

The latest JDBC postgres driver is available at https://jdbc.postgresql.org/download.html , at the time of this writing, the latest version is postgresql-9.4-1201.jdbc41.jar (which works fine with xwiki), you need to download the driver to your server, a good place is where the other drivers are: /usr/share/java, then remove the symlink postgresql-jdbc4.jar and replace it by one to the new driver:

wget -O /usr/share/java/postgresql-9.4-1201.jdbc41.jar https://jdbc.postgresql.org/download/postgresql-9.4-1201.jdbc41.jar
rm /usr/share/java/postgresql-jdbc4.jar
ln -s /usr/share/java/postgresql-9.4-1201.jdbc41.jar /usr/share/java/postgresql-jdbc4.jar

Restart tomcat and you will not have any issue with the JDBC driver.

XWiki won't start and I get Solr related error(s) in the log

There is no automatic migration of Solr schema and it changes from time to time. The simplest fix in such case is usually to stop Tomcat, delete the folder /var/lib/xwiki/data/solr and restart Tomcat. XWiki will automatically create a new one and start indexing the wiki.

sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat8 stop
rm -rf /var/lib/xwiki/data/solr
sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat8 start

Other useful info

XWiki as root webapp (short URLs)

When doing it make sure to check after upgrade if all is OK in /etc/tomcat8/Catalina/localhost folder (xwiki.xml might be restored).

  • Rename file /etc/tomcat7/Catalina/localhost/xwiki.xml into /etc/tomcat8/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml
  • Edit file /etc/xwiki/xwiki-tomcat8.xml (or /etc/xwiki/xwiki-tomcat7.xml depending on your tomcat version) and modify Context XML element path from /xwiki to / as in moving from
    <Context path="/xwiki" docBase="/usr/lib/xwiki" privileged="true" allowLinking="true" crossContext="true">
     <!-- make symlinks work in Tomcat -->
     <Resources className="org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext" allowLinking="true" />
    </Context>

    to

    <Context path="/" docBase="/usr/lib/xwiki" privileged="true" allowLinking="true" crossContext="true">
     <!-- make symlinks work in Tomcat -->
     <Resources className="org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext" allowLinking="true" />
    </Context>
  • Edit file /etc/xwiki/xwiki.cfg and uncomment xwiki.webapppath=

Note that this is only the part of Short URL which is specific to the Debian setup, for the rest you will have to look at the generic documentation.

Integrate with LibreOffice

Install libreoffice with sudo apt-get install libreoffice.

And setup XWiki to automatically start and access libreoffice in /etc/xwiki/xwiki.properties:

openoffice.autoStart=true
openoffice.homePath=/usr/lib/libreoffice/

See Office Importer Application for more details.

Overview of the important files

Here is a list of a different tree. The point is to help you find useful files easily. This list is showing a few files and directories, to keep it simple and clear. The '->' is used to show a link to another file/directory.

XWiki

The configuration: /etc/xwiki/

  • hibernate.cfg.xml        Hibernate configuration, helping to configure the database resources
  • xwiki.cfg
  • xwiki.properties

The permanent directory: /var/lib/xwiki/data

The home directory: /usr/lib/xwiki/

  • META-INF
  • resources
  • skins
  • templates
  • WEB-INF
    • hibernate.cfg.xml -> /etc/xwiki/hibernate.cfg.xml
    • xwiki.cfg -> /etc/xwiki/xwiki.cfg
    • xwiki.properties -> /etc/xwiki/xwiki.properties

Tomcat

/etc/tomcat<version>/

  • context.xml
  • logging.properties
  • server.xml
  • tomcat-users.xml
  • web.xml

/etc/default/

  • tomcat<version>                 This file helps configuring the Tomcat daemon. Every change needs a restart to be effective

/etc/init.d/

  • tomcat<version>                 Daemon start/stop script

/var/lib/tomcat<version>/

  • common
  • conf -> /etc/tomcat<version>
  • logs -> ../../log/tomcat<version>
  • server
  • shared
  • webapps

/var/log/tomcat<version>/

  • catalina.out            First logging file. Check this one if you're experiencing troubles with Tomcat/XWiki.
  • localhost.<date>.log     "Container Log file": Start of each filter and failures thereof are listed.

MySQL

/etc/mysql/

  • debian.cnf
  • my.cnf                  Database configuration. Max_allowed_packet is the parameter you  need to change to improve upload data size. permitted.

/var/lib/mysql/

  • mysql
  • xwiki                   This is the xwiki database. You may want to backup this directory from time to time.

/var/log/

  • syslog
  • mysql
    • error.log

PostgreSQL

/etc/postgresql/

  • <version>
    • main
      • postgresql.conf
      • pg_hba.conf

/var/lib/postgresql/<version>/main/

  • base
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