Local development quickstart

This page is a quickstart guide to setting up a local development for MediaWiki using PHP and Composer.

This workflow is only suitable for local development. To serve a public website, see Manual:Installation requirements .

Install prerequisites

MediaWiki's master branch requires PHP 8.3.0+ and Composer 2.

Linux

On Ubuntu 24+ or Debian 13+, install the required packages using APT.

sudo apt install php php-intl php-mbstring php-xml php-apcu php-curl php-sqlite3 composer

On Fedora 40+, install the required packages using DNF.

sudo dnf install php composer

On Arch Linux, install the required packages using pacman.

sudo pacman -S php composer

Mac

Install the required packages using Homebrew and make it the active version of PHP, by linking it.

brew install php@8.5 composer
brew link --overwrite php@8.5

If the following command succeeds, it should show the PHP version. If it fails, likely your $PATH is not configured to find commands from brew.

php -v

Windows

You have the option to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux and follow the Linux instructions on this page. Or, to install MediaWiki directly on Windows, install the required packages using Chocolatey.

choco install -y php composer

To load the required PHP extensions, edit your php.ini file, and uncomment the following lines. To find the location of php.ini, run php --ini, and look for Loaded Configuration File.

extension=fileinfo
extension=intl
extension=pdo_sqlite
extension=zip
extension=sodium

Clone MediaWiki

Use Git to clone the MediaWiki core repository and the default skin.

git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/core.git mediawiki

git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/skins/Vector.git mediawiki/skins/Vector

cd mediawiki

Cloning MediaWiki takes a few minutes. While you're waiting, if you plan to create and share patches, create a Wikimedia developer account if you don't already have one.

Install dependencies

From within your mediawiki directory, created above, use Composer to install MediaWiki's dependencies.

composer update

Install MediaWiki

Install MediaWiki with PHP's built-in SQLite database.

composer mw-install:sqlite

Start server

Start PHP's built-in webserver, and open localhost:4000 in a browser to see your MediaWiki instance. To log in as an administrator , use username Admin and password adminpassword.

composer serve

Next steps

• Take a tour of the MediaWiki codebase – Familiarize yourself with MediaWiki's core code by learning about entry points and top-level directories.
• Run unit tests – MediaWiki uses the PHPUnit framework for unit and integration testing of PHP code. Read the docs to run tests and find information about writing tests.
• Install extensions – Add extensions, like VisualEditor and Echo , to your development environment. See Manual:Developing extensions to learn about how extensions work.
• Debug your code – Learn how to configure debugging aids, and debug MediaWiki code step-by-step with XDebug.
• Submit a patch – Explore Good first bugs , and configure SSH access to Wikimedia Gerrit to submit a patch.