Deployment guide

DokuWiki

Overview

DokuWiki is a simple, highly versatile open source wiki that needs no database. Every page is a plain text file on disk, so backups are trivial, version history is built in, and there is no database server to run, tune or back up separately. It is a popular choice for documentation, knowledge bases, team wikis, runbooks and manuals.

The SecureAnyCloud image installs the current stable DokuWiki release, served by nginx and PHP 8.3 FPM on a hardened Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base that is patched at build time. Backed by 24/7 SecureAnyCloud support.

What you get:

DokuWiki (stable release) served by nginx and PHP 8.3 FPM, managed by systemd.
The DokuWiki web interface on :80, behind an nginx reverse proxy, with Access Control Lists enabled.
A per-VM admin account with a unique administrator password, generated on the first boot of every VM and recorded in a root-only file.
A dedicated Azure data disk at /var/lib/dokuwiki for all wiki content: pages, media, metadata and the search index.
nginx.service and php8.3-fpm.service as systemd units, enabled and active.
An unauthenticated /healthz endpoint for Azure Load Balancer health probes.
24/7 SecureAnyCloud support.

Prerequisites

An active Azure subscription, an SSH key pair, and a VNet and subnet in the target region.
Standard_B2s (2 vCPU / 4 GiB RAM) is a sensible starting point. Size up for busier wikis or large media libraries.
NSG inbound: allow 22/tcp from your management network and 80/tcp for the wiki.

DokuWiki serves plain HTTP on port 80. For production, terminate TLS in front of it with your own domain.

Step 1 - Deploy from the Azure Marketplace

Sign in to the Azure Portal, choose Create a resource, search the Marketplace for DokuWiki by SecureAnyCloud, and select Create.

On Basics, pick your subscription, resource group, region and size. Under Administrator account, choose SSH public key and paste your key. Under Inbound port rules, allow SSH (22) and HTTP (80).

Review the dedicated data disk on the Disks tab, then select Review + create and Create.

Step 2 - Deploy from the Azure CLI

# Accept the Marketplace terms once per subscription (required before the first CLI deploy)
az vm image terms accept --urn sac1647283583153:dokuwiki-ubuntu-24-04:default:latest
az vm create \
  --resource-group <your-rg> \
  --name dokuwiki \
  --image sac1647283583153:dokuwiki-ubuntu-24-04:default:latest \
  --size Standard_B2s \
  --admin-username azureuser \
  --ssh-key-values ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub \
  --vnet-name <your-vnet> --subnet <your-subnet> \
  --public-ip-sku Standard
az vm open-port --resource-group <your-rg> --name dokuwiki --port 80 --priority 1010

Step 3 - Connect to your VM

ssh azureuser@<vm-public-ip>

Step 4 - Confirm the services are running

DokuWiki is served by nginx on port 80, which forwards PHP requests to PHP 8.3 FPM over a local socket. Confirm that both services are active and that nginx is listening on port 80.

systemctl is-active nginx php8.3-fpm dokuwiki-firstboot ss -tlnp | grep ':80 '

Step 5 - Retrieve your admin password

On the first boot of every VM, dokuwiki-firstboot.service generates a unique administrator password, seeds the DokuWiki admin account with it, and writes the details to a root-only file. Read the file with this command.

sudo cat /root/dokuwiki-credentials.txt

Step 6 - Confirm the stack and health endpoint

nginx serves an unauthenticated /healthz endpoint for load balancer probes. Confirm the DokuWiki release and the PHP version, and check that the wiki responds.

cat /var/www/dokuwiki/VERSION php -v | head -1 curl -sI http://127.0.0.1/healthz | head -1 curl -s http://127.0.0.1/doku.php?id=start | grep -o '<title>[^<]*</title>'

Step 7 - Open the wiki in your browser

Browse to http://<vm-public-ip>/. The wiki start page is the welcome page shipped with the image. Anonymous visitors can read it, because read access is granted to everyone by default.

Step 8 - Sign in as admin

Click Log In in the top right. Enter admin and the password from Step 5.

Once you sign in, the user tools show Logged in as: Administrator (admin) along with the Admin and Log Out links. Every section gains an Edit button.

Step 9 - Create and edit pages

To create a page, visit a page name that does not exist yet and click Create this page. To change a page, edit the existing page. Pages use DokuWiki's simple wiki markup.

Organize related pages into namespaces by separating names with a colon, for example projects:alpha. The editor provides a formatting toolbar and a live preview.

Step 10 - Manage users and Access Control Lists

Open the Admin menu to reach the administration panel. From there you can:

Manage users in the User Manager.
Control who can read and edit which namespaces in Access Control List Management.
Adjust wiki behavior in Configuration Settings.
Install plugins from the Extension Manager.

The default policy shipped with this image grants read access to everyone and edit access to logged-in users. Tighten or relax it to suit your organization.

Step 11 - Confirm wiki content lives on the dedicated disk

All wiki content lives under /var/lib/dokuwiki, which is a dedicated Azure data disk captured into the image and re-provisioned on every VM.

Because DokuWiki is database-free, everything (pages, media, metadata, the search index and version history) is plain files under this mount.

df -h /var/lib/dokuwiki | tail -1 ls /var/lib/dokuwiki findmnt -no SOURCE,TARGET,FSTYPE /var/lib/dokuwiki

Maintenance

Back up your wiki: because DokuWiki needs no database, a backup is a copy of /var/lib/dokuwiki (all pages, media, metadata and history) plus /var/www/dokuwiki/conf (users and ACLs). Snapshot the data disk or tar the directory.
Add users: sign in as admin and use Admin then User Manager. Self-registration is disabled by default on this appliance.
Namespaces and ACLs: use Admin then Access Control List Management to scope read and write access per namespace.
Plugins and templates: install extensions from Admin then Extension Manager.
Security updates: unattended security upgrades are enabled, so the OS keeps itself patched. Reboot when a new kernel is installed.
TLS: for production, front DokuWiki with your own domain and a TLS-terminating reverse proxy or Azure Application Gateway.

Support

SecureAnyCloud provides 24/7/365 expert technical support for this image. Contact sales@secureanycloud.com. DokuWiki is licensed under GPL 2.0. SecureAnyCloud provides this image, and additional charges apply for build, maintenance and 24/7 support.

Deploy on Azure

Launch DokuWiki on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on Azure with 24/7 support from SecureAnyCloud.

View this image

Need Help?

Our support team is available 24/7.

sales@secureanycloud.com

Deploy on Azure

Overview

DokuWiki is an open source, database-less wiki: a lightweight platform for documentation, knowledge bases, intranets and team collaboration. It stores everything as plain files on disk, including pages, page history, uploaded media, metadata and the full-text search index. There is no database server to install, tune or back up.

This image runs DokuWiki as a PHP application. nginx answers on port 80 (and 443 once you add TLS) and passes requests to php-fpm over a local socket. DokuWiki reads and writes its content directly on disk.

What you get:

Wiki content (the DokuWiki savedir, holding pages, media, metadata, cache and the search index) on a dedicated EBS data volume mounted at /var/lib/dokuwiki. The volume is separate from the operating system disk, and you can resize it independently.
The program code at /var/www/dokuwiki.
A single administrator account with a per-instance password. A one-shot service generates it on the first boot of every deployed instance, seeds it into DokuWiki's flat-file user store, and writes the login to /root/dokuwiki-credentials.txt with mode 0600.
No shared or default credentials in the image.

Prerequisites

Before you deploy this image, make sure you have the following.

An Amazon Web Services account where you can launch EC2 instances.
IAM permissions to launch instances, create security groups, and subscribe to AWS Marketplace products.
An EC2 key pair in the target Region for SSH access to the instance.
A VPC and subnet in the target Region, with a security group that allows inbound port 22 from your management network and inbound ports 80 and 443 from the networks your wiki users reach DokuWiki on.
The AWS CLI (version 2) installed locally, if you plan to deploy from the command line.

Launch the instance from the AWS Marketplace

Sign in to the AWS Management Console, open the EC2 service, and select Launch instance. Under Application and OS Images, choose AWS Marketplace AMIs and search for DokuWiki. Select the SecureAnyCloud listing, choose Select, then choose Continue on the subscription summary.

Pick an instance type of t3.small or larger. Choose your EC2 key pair under Key pair (login).

Under Network settings, select your VPC and subnet. Create or select a security group that allows inbound port 22 from your management network and inbound ports 80 and 443 from the networks your users use.

Leave the root volume at the default size or larger. The image adds a separate data volume for the wiki content automatically.

Select Launch instance. First boot initialization takes a few seconds after the instance state becomes Running and the status checks pass.

Launch the instance from the AWS CLI

Run the following block to launch an instance from the SecureAnyCloud DokuWiki Marketplace AMI into an existing subnet and security group. Replace <ami-id> with the AMI ID shown on the Marketplace listing, <key-name> with your EC2 key pair name, <subnet-id> with your subnet ID, and <security-group-id> with a security group that opens ports 22, 80, and 443 as described above.

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id <ami-id> \
  --instance-type t3.small \
  --key-name <key-name> \
  --subnet-id <subnet-id> \
  --security-group-ids <security-group-id> \
  --block-device-mappings '[{"DeviceName":"/dev/sda1","Ebs":{"VolumeSize":20,"VolumeType":"gp3"}}]' \
  --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=dokuwiki-01}]'

On success, the command prints a JSON document. Note the instance ID, then retrieve the instance's public address once it is running, with aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids <instance-id> --query "Reservations[].Instances[].PublicIpAddress" --output text.

Connect and retrieve the administrator login

Connect over SSH with the key pair you selected and the public IP address from step 2. The SSH login user depends on the operating system of the AMI variant you launched.

DokuWiki on Ubuntu 24.04: SSH login user ubuntu

ssh -i /path/to/your-key.pem ubuntu@<public-ip>

First boot writes the per-instance administrator password to a root-only file. Read the file with this command.

sudo cat /root/dokuwiki-credentials.txt

The file contains the wiki URL, the admin username (admin) and the generated DOKUWIKI_ADMIN_PASSWORD. These credentials are unique to this instance.

Confirm that the services are running and that the wiki answers locally.

systemctl is-active nginx php8.3-fpm curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'healthz %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/healthz curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'start %{http_code}\n' 'http://127.0.0.1/doku.php?id=start'

nginx and php8.3-fpm report active, and both HTTP checks return 200. The /healthz endpoint is unauthenticated, so you can use it for a load balancer or uptime monitor.

First sign-in

Open the wiki in your browser at http://<instance-public-ip>/. The welcome start page loads immediately, with no installer and no database setup.

Select Log In at the top right. Enter the username admin and the password from /root/dokuwiki-credentials.txt, then select Log In.

Once you sign in, Logged in as: Administrator appears in the top bar, with Admin and Log Out links.

Create and edit pages

DokuWiki pages use a simple, readable markup. To change the current page, select Edit this page. The editor opens with a formatting toolbar for headings, bold, italics, links, lists, tables and image embeds.

To create a new page, visit a URL for a page that does not exist yet, for example http://<instance-public-ip>/doku.php?id=team:onboarding, and select Create this page. The colon in the page id creates a namespace (team), which is how DokuWiki organizes pages into a hierarchy.

Upload images and other files through Media Manager. Use the search box to find content across the wiki. DokuWiki maintains a full-text index automatically.

Every edit is versioned. The Old revisions control on each page lets you compare any two revisions and roll back to an earlier one.

Administer users, ACLs and plugins

Select Admin in the top bar to open the administration area. From there you can:

User Manager: add developer, editor and reader accounts, and place users into groups.
Access Control List Management: grant or restrict read, edit, create, upload and delete permission per namespace and per user or group. The image ships with ACLs on: anonymous visitors can read, and signed-in users in the user group can edit and upload. The admin account is a superuser and bypasses ACLs.
Extension Manager: browse and install DokuWiki plugins and templates directly from the admin UI.
Configuration Settings: change the wiki title, license, interface language and hundreds of other options.

The wiki title, savedir and ACL policy for this image are defined in /var/www/dokuwiki/conf/local.php. Inspect the file with this command.

sudo cat /var/www/dokuwiki/conf/local.php

Where the content lives

All wiki content is on the dedicated data volume mounted at /var/lib/dokuwiki. Confirm the mount and view the DokuWiki savedir layout.

findmnt /var/lib/dokuwiki
sudo ls /var/lib/dokuwiki

The pages, media, meta, index, attic (page history) and cache directories are all here. Because this is a separate EBS volume, you can resize it independently of the operating system disk and snapshot it on its own schedule.

Configure HTTPS (recommended)

For production use, put DokuWiki behind TLS. Point a DNS record at the instance, make sure inbound port 443 is open, and install a certificate with Certbot's nginx plugin. Replace your-dokuwiki-host.example.com with your fully qualified domain name.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d your-dokuwiki-host.example.com

Certbot obtains and installs the certificate, updates the nginx server block to listen on 443, and sets up automatic renewal.

Backup and maintenance

Because DokuWiki is database-less, a backup is a copy of the savedir. Snapshot the /var/lib/dokuwiki EBS volume on a schedule, or archive the directory.

sudo tar czf /var/tmp/dokuwiki-backup-$(date +%F).tgz -C /var/lib/dokuwiki .

Keep the operating system patched with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. Update DokuWiki itself by following the DokuWiki upgrade documentation. The flat-file store is preserved across upgrades.

To install additional functionality, use the Extension Manager in the admin area.

Support

SecureAnyCloud provides this image with 24/7 technical support by email and chat. We can help with deployment, namespace and access-control design, plugin and template selection, storage and search-index maintenance, and backup and upgrade planning. Contact details are on the SecureAnyCloud website.

All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.

Deploy on AWS

Launch DokuWiki on AWS with 24/7 support from SecureAnyCloud.

View on Marketplace

Need Help?

Our support team is available 24/7.

sales@secureanycloud.com

Deploy on AWS