Mike's Wiki

Setting up this Wiki

Intro

I'm self-hosted, and I want to run a wiki (this) behind a proxy. My front-end is NGINX while the page you are reading is Apache.

From 30,000 feet.

NGINX front-end, but when someone passes “mikelivolsi.com/wiki”, the “/wiki” will pass traffic to the back-end server running the wiki.
The back-end server is running Apache2
The document home for the wiki is /var/www/wiki

Prerequisites

Unix firewall (UFW) - or equivalent - should be running and only allow traffic from the front-end nginx site
You will need to install the proper php libraries (running php 8.4)
Don't follow verbatim ChatGPT or Gemini, as they will make you nuts if you listen to them.

Steps

Step 1: sudo to root
Step 2: cd /var/www and make the directory wiki
Step 3: cd wiki
Step 4: get the latest copy: curl -o doku.tgz https://download.dokuwiki.org/src/dokuwiki/dokuwiki-stable.tgz
Step 5: Extract the wiki: tar -xzvf doku.tgz
Step 6: Rename the resulting directory: mv dokuwiki-2025-05-14b dokuwiki
Step 7: change ownership to www-data:www-data for everything under /var/www/wiki
Step 8: cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
Step 9: Create a file called wiki.conf and make sure it looks similar to the following:

  <VirtualHost *:xxxx>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    ServerName  wiki.mikelivolsi.com

    DocumentRoot /var/www/wiki/dokuwiki

    DirectoryIndex doku.php index.php


    <Directory /var/www/wiki/dokuwiki/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        Require all granted
        AllowOverride All
        DirectoryIndex doku.php index.php
    </Directory>

    <IfModule mod_dav.c>
        Dav off
    </IfModule>

    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /var/www/wiki/cgi-bin/

    <Directory "/var/www/wiki/cgi-bin">
        AllowOverride None
        Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
        Require all granted

        AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl .py
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/wiki_error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/wiki_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Step 10 - Make configuration visible: a2ensite wiki
Step 11 - Edit the docu-wiki configuration: vi /var/www/wiki/conf/dokuwiki.php
Step 12 - Make the following changes:

$conf['baseurl'] = '/';
$conf['basedir'] = '/wiki';
$conf['useurlrewriting'] = false;  // keep false for reverse proxy

Step 13 - enable re-write if not already enabled: a2enmod rewrite
Step 14 - Enable the configuration: systemctl restart apache2
Step 15 - Make sure to configure your site with the username, etc.. via your browser

            http://<your ip>/install.php

Step 16 - Login to your nginx site
Step 17 - cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
Step 18 - Before this block, add the subsequent block in this doc, above it !!!

»> NOTE «< If should come before any asset declarations, like I had for wordpress:

    # Static assets for WordPress
    location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
        expires max;
        log_not_found off;
    }

My block

    # -------------------------------
    # DokuWiki reverse proxy
    # -------------------------------
    location ^~ /wiki/ {
        proxy_pass http://192.168.1.x:xxxx/;
        proxy_set_header Host $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;

        # Important for DokuWiki
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $server_port;

        proxy_redirect off;
    }

    # Redirect /wiki (no trailing slash)
    location = /wiki {
        return 301 /wiki/;
    }

Restart nginx: systemctl restart nginx

Afterwards, if you go to your site.. like “https://www.mikelivolsi.com/wiki” it will take you to your wiki.

Notes

 Certificates are handled by the front-end server, so the back-end can run http