PDF output of a Mediawiki wiki?

[jiawen]

How do I get my (FutureQuest-hosted, Installatron-installed) mediawiki to output PDF? This wiki is a (for now) private project, with account creation and viewing access locked down. I'd like to compile a book of the entire wiki.

Things I've tried:

• The Collection extension's readme has a big warning saying not to use it with private wiki accounts on public render servers, because communication between the extension and the server is unsecured. So that method's out.
• ...But there's apparently no way to install a private server. FutureQuest, last I heard, could not install mwlib because it is unstable. (Is that still true?)
• ...And even if FutureQuest can install a stable, more recent version of mwlib, the version compatible with my wiki might not be stable. (The wiki is version 1.21. I can't upgrade to a more recent version because of the backup problems Installatron has been having.)
• medaiwiki2latex, the only other solution I've found, doesn't seem to work if it can't freely create its own account into the wiki.

Are there other ways to output PDF from a Mediawiki wiki? What have I not tried, or not understood?

(And actually, I'd ideally like to output ODT or other easily-editable document format, but PDF would be acceptable.)

Thanks!

[Kevin]

As far as mwlib goes it is probably outside of the scope of what should be running on the web server and would probably require significant resources.

However, I found some instructions for setting up your own mwlib based rendering server here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Setup...untu_12.04_LTS

The document is a bit out-dated but I doubt much has changed since 2012. I am sure the 2014 version of Ubuntu would work fine and it could probably be installed on a USB stick for this purpose.

[jiawen]

Originally Posted by Kevin

However, I found some instructions for setting up your own mwlib based rendering server here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Setup...untu_12.04_LTS

It looks, from the LocalSettings.php section, like this method still requires the server to have a public URL. It doesn't seem to specify what the IP would be for a local install. Is it possible to set LocalSettings.php to work from my local computer?

Thanks for your response!

[Kevin]

I am certainly not an expert on this product. In fact, reading that page constitutes most of what I know about it...

But it seems to me like you are conflating "public" with "accessible". Anything you host at FutureQuest is accessible (possibly restricted by password and/or IP address). That doesn't necessarily make it public (since the public might not find the URL, might not have a password, or might not be from the right IP address).

The warning about giving private access to a public render server refers to the fact that you are giving whatever credentials are needed to access your private but accessible wiki to an unknown 3rd party.

The documentation I linked to is about making a private render server so that you don't have to give such information to a public render server run by an unknown 3rd party.

[jiawen]

Sorry, I forgot to link to the LocalSettings.php section that I was talking about. It refers to

$wgCollectionMWServeURL = 'http://yourrenderserverurlorip/cache';

What would be the IP address if I'm running it on my own computer? 127.0.0.1, my actual IP address, or something else? And if it's 127.0.0.1, then it seems to run into a conflict with the section Start Your Server, which says:

Please note that nserve does not allow you to have your mediawiki base_url (equivalent to $wgServer in LocalSettings.php) set to localhost or an IP beginning with 127.0. or 192.168.

Seems like you understand the ins and outs of web apps a lot better than I do, so even if you're just reading the page and understanding it better than me, you're helping a lot! Thanks.

[Terra]

You could use the public render server provided by PediaPress
https://github.com/pediapress/Collection

Of interest

If you have a low-traffic MediaWiki you can use the public render server running at http://tools.pediapress.com/mw-serve/. In this case, just keep the configuration variable $wgCollectionMWServeURL (see below) at its default value.

Unfortunately, you would not be able to run a render server on our network as it relies on opening up TCP listening sockets... We would not authorize such a daemon on a Community Server for security and resource reasons...

On the topic of 127.0.0.1, that is completely local to the host computer only and is not accessible via the network... You would need to use your gateway IP address... Setting this up would be far outside the scope of our technical support... I will say it can be done, with enough time and effort thrown at it though... If I had to do this project, it would probably take me about 3 to 4 hours to build (from scratch) and hook up the network (redirection and security) access linkage... Since I didn't find any pre-built Docker images for this, I'd say you need to look at building a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS virtual machine and run it under KVM or VirtualBox - if you don't want to throw a whole machine at it... In short, if you stick with the docs, you should be able to build and implement your own private render server if there are requirements preventing you from using a publicly available render server...

[jiawen]

Unfortunately, as I noted, the PediaPress server says the following under "Password-Protected Wikis":

SECURITY NOTICE: If the MediaWiki and the render server communicate over an insecure channel (for example on an unencrypted channel over the internet), please DO NOT USE THIS SETTING, as the credentials will be exposed to eavesdropping!

I don't see any way to have the wiki and the server communicate via a secured method, so that basically means that using PediaPress (and other Extension:Collection-based servers) is out, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

I totally understand not running a server on FutureQuest's network. I just wish there was an understandable way to do it myself. I don't know how to get a server running with its own public IP address, and the MediaWiki documentation is generally really unclear on a lot of issues, so it seems like I won't be able to do this.

Oh, well. Thank you for trying. FutureQuest is always very helpful, and this is no exception.

[Terra]

Well, if you know the exact IP address that PediaPress would connect to your MediaWiki with, then you could disable password protection for just that IP via the Apache 'Satisfy any' directive...

Just something to ponder...

[Kevin]

Also, you could just change the password.

Also, if you aren't using SSL on your web site you are using the same insecure internet just not the third party server.

[jiawen]

Originally Posted by Kevin

Also, you could just change the password.

Also, if you aren't using SSL on your web site you are using the same insecure internet just not the third party server.

I did just that, and it worked great. Thank you for the idea.