Last modified: 2014-09-24 00:12:26 UTC
Running a cli installation, I got the following error: $ php maintenance/install.php --dbtype=sqlite --dbpath=~/work/code/mediawiki/data wiki admin ... You can install MediaWiki. Setting up database Cannot create the data directory ~/work/code/mediawiki/data, because the parent directory ~/work/code/mediawiki is not writable by the webserver. The installer has determined the user your webserver is running as. Make the data directory writable by it to continue. On a Unix/Linux system do: cd ~/work/code/mediawiki mkdir data chgrp mah data chmod g+w data I followed the above directions, but they didn't help. Thinking it was a permissions problem of some kind I just erased the data subdirectory, but that didn't work. Evidently it doesn't expand the ~ properly. When I wrote out "/home/mah", I got: $ php maintenance/install.php --dbtype=sqlite --dbpath=/home/mah/work/code/mediawiki/data wiki admin ... You can install MediaWiki. Setting up database Unable to write to the directory "/home/mah/work/code/mediawiki/data". Change its permissions so that the webserver can write to it, and try again. In this case it was unable to write because I had removed the directory. The previous message implied that it was going to create the directory, but evidently it lied. When I created the directory and used the full path instead of ~, it worked.
~ expansion is done by the shell, not by mediawiki. Whate shell are you using? Seems that something like 'echo foo=~/foo' expands it, but echo --foo=~/foo does not. Alternatively, use --dbpath=$HOME/work/code/mediawiki/data which is the POSIX way.
(In reply to comment #1) > Whate shell are you using? Bash. > Seems that something like 'echo foo=~/foo' expands it, but echo --foo=~/foo > does not. I tried realpath("~") but got nothing. I suggest that a warning is at least given if ~ is the first character of the path. Also, it should actually try to create the data subdir.
I didn't mention, using an space is another way to make it happen: php maintenance/install.php --dbtype=sqlite --dbpath ~/data wiki admin The way to add that feature would be: if (substr($value, 0, 2) == '~/') { $value = getenv("HOME") . substr($value, 1); }
note that your suggestion ignores cases of tilde expansion like ~www/ which would expand to the www user's home directory. You would have to call, This looks more complex than I initially anticipated: if ( substr( $value, 0, 1 ) == '~') { $home = getenv("HOME"); if ( is_string($home) && $value == "~" ) { $value = "$home/"; } else if ( is_string( $home ) && substr( $value, 0, 2 ) == '~/' ) { $value = $home . substr($value, 1); } else if ( substr( $value, 0, 1 ) == '~' && strlen( $value ) > 2 && function_exists( "posix_getpwnam" ) ) { $offset = strpos( $value, "/" ); if($offset == false ) { $offset = strlen($value); $value = "$value/"; } $pwent = posix_getpwnam( substr( $value, 1, $offset - 1 ) ); if( isset( $pwent['dir'] ) ) { $value = $pwent['dir'] . substr( $value, $offset ); } } } if ( substr( $value, 0, 1 ) == '~') { die( "Couldn't expand the tilde\n" ); }
Decided today in IRC that this is low-priority. For reference: From IRC discussion today: Chad Horohoe: Rather than trying to jump through hoops to figure out where the path is, why not just error out when a ~ path is given and say "give a full path please" Greg Sabino Mullane: That's some hacky code there. Why are we not just disallowing ~ ? Chad: Exactly. It's easier just to say "don't do that" than anything else.
