XWiki is a free and open source advanced Wiki Software platform written in Java. It runs on application servers like JBoss, Tomcat etc. and uses databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL to store its information.

There are several methods of installing XWiki. In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install XWiki using APT, which is probably the fastest and easiest way because all components needed by XWiki for a production instance are automatically installed on the server. We will use a clean Debian 9 Cloud VPS but you should be able to install XWiki following this tutorial on all Debian based Linux distributions.

Add the repository for the XWiki packages:

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

Update the package lists on the server:

apt-get update

XWiki offers these packages if you want to manage one or more components from your XWiki stack:

xwiki-common - This is the XWiki common package, if you want to manage the application and database server yourself you can install this package
xwiki-mysql-common - This is the XWiki MySQL package, if you want to manage the application server yourself you can install this package
xwiki-pgsql-common - This is the XWiki PostgreSQL package, if you want to manage the application server yourself you can install this package
xwiki-tomcat-common - This is the XWiki Tomcat package, if you want to manage the database server yourself you can install this package

You can list all the packages that the XWiki repository has with this command:

 apt-cache search xwiki*

This should be the output of the command above:

xwiki-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-mysql-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-pgsql-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat-mysql - XWiki enterprise Tomcat/MySQL based package
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat-pgsql - XWiki enterprise Tomcat/PostgreSQL
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat5-mysql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat5-pgsql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat6-mysql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat6-pgsql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat7-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat7-mysql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat7-pgsql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat8-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat8-mysql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-enterprise-tomcat8-pgsql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-mysql-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-pgsql-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-solr-data - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-tomcat7-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-tomcat7-mysql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-tomcat7-pgsql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-tomcat8-common - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-tomcat8-mysql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis
xwiki-tomcat8-pgsql - XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis

Note: The enterprise packages are legacy XWiki packages.

We are going to install the xwiki-tomcat8-mysql package as it comes with Tomcat 8 and MariaDB pre-installed, this way you won’t have to install and configure an application and database server:

apt-get install -y xwiki-tomcat8-mysql

This command will install lots of packages, wait until a dialog box pops up asking you if you should configure XWiki with dbconfig-common then press Yes to continue.Then the installation will ask you for a MySQL application password for XWiki just leave that blank, it’ll generate a random password for the application.
After the package manager is done installing all the packages navigate to the following URL:

http://your-server-ip:8080/xwiki

Now you can complete your XWiki installation by creating the administrator user and choosing an XWiki flavor or installing XWiki extensions according to your own preference.

Of course, you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux Cloud VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install XWiki for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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