Most computers can extract a zip file without additional software.
Users of 7-Zip: Note that prior to 2021, 7-Zip was unable to extract .tar.gz files correctly (T257102). It is recommended to update to the latest version first.
MediaWiki requires PHP 7.4.3+, a webserver software, and either MariaDB 10.3.0+, MySQL 5.7.0+, SQLite3.8.0+ or PostgreSQL 10.0+.
Using MariaDB or MySQL is recommended as Wikipedia uses MariaDB.
Any other database servers are less tested and you may likely run into some bugs.
MediaWiki is not compatible with PHP 7.4.0 - 7.4.2 due to an upstream bug. Use PHP 7.4.3+ instead. See task T246594 for more information.
If using PHP 8, it is recommended to use MediaWiki 1.38.4 or higher. PHP 8 is not in use by Wikimedia wikis, and thus gets less testing, but other groups do use MediaWiki with PHP 8 without issue. If you encounter any bugs when using MediaWiki with PHP 8, please report them. See task T248925 for more information.
Download via command line
To download MediaWiki 1.41.1 in a terminal on a Linux machine using wget, use one of the following commands:
Active MediaWiki developers should instead download from Git to get the latest version of the MediaWiki software.
The git repository has earlier versions of the software, so it is possible to switch to ("check out") a particular release.
Developers downloading from Git will also need to manually install dependencies via Composer.
Keep in mind that you are downloading the latest alpha version of MediaWiki, which is not recommended for production use! Although this can be used in production, it is more likely to contain bugs.
Developers wanting to install MediaWiki locally to have an environment for development of MediaWiki core or extensions should also read How to become a MediaWiki hacker for further instructions.
Signature downloads
GPG security signatures to verify your download with GNU Privacy Guard:
Some users may prefer to skip manual installation by using a pre-integrated MediaWiki software applianceorhosting services.
Repositories of some Linux distributions also increasingly offer packages for MediaWiki, with different degrees of frequency and extensions coverage (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo).
If your MediaWiki installation is heavily modified, it may be difficult to incorporate the latest official changes/updates to MediaWiki. To support such users, we maintain old branches of our code for up to a year for the legacy release and up to three years for the legacy long term support release.
You can find tarballs (with extension *.tar.gz) of old versions of MediaWiki in the MediaWiki download archives.
Some missing releases are available as tags of the Git repository.
Footnotes
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This could cause reference problems when you later use "git pull" to upgrade your shallow clone and the newer revision refers to older revisions which are not yet downloaded to your system. In such a case you can simply download more - increase the depth value - or all revisions later, or make a fresh shallow clone.
