CLTidball wrote
andi wrote
This has been discussed before in the forum. Do not run the on-a-stick release on a network drive. That is not what it is made for and it's completely silly. Run a webserver on you NAS and let that serve DokuWiki.
Could you provide links to the previous discussions, please, so I can understand the why's behind why it's considered 'silly'?
Sorry the thread I remembered was in German:
https://forum.dokuwiki.org/thread/16320 So let me explain it in English again for future reference.
First of all let's start with some background knowledge. DokuWiki is a web application written in the PHP scripting language. This means it needs two things: a PHP interpreter (to run the PHP scripts) and a web server (to serve files like images as well as the HTML produced by the PHP scripts via the HTTP network protocol).
The traditional setup is to run mod_php (the PHP interpreter) and Apache (the webserver) to run DokuWiki (there are other combinations of interpreter and webserver setups). Both of these are machine dependent, compiled software (like exe and dll files on a Windows system).
Now the nice thing about a web application is that you set the interpreter/webserver once on a server and then you can access it via HTTP in your browser from everywhere.
For a wiki on the Internet, you usually don't setup the webserver and interpreter yourself. These things are provided by your hoster. But when you want to run DokuWiki on your own hardware you need to do it yourself.
This is where DokuWiki on a stick comes in. The download comes with a webserver and PHP preinstalled for Windows and everything is preconfigured to just run. There's an actual apache.exe file that gets executed, starts the webserver (and mod_php) and runs both on your localhost.
So for a web site on a hoster or when running DokuWiki on a stick from your local computer it looks like this:
So far for the background on DokuWiki and the on-a-stick version.
Now when you want to put the on-a-stick version on a network drive and expect all your users to start the apache.exe to access the same wiki, you're actually using a network protocol for file access to exceute a copy of the webserver and PHP interpreter on each of your user's computers.
Basically you're doing this:
Not only is that silly from a resource usage view, it will probably have all kinds of weird side effects.
DokuWiki expects to run in a server with a local file system. But when you run the webserver on the client machine (which is what you do when you start it from the network drive - it runs in the client machine's RAM) this is no longer the case. The files are still accessed via the file protocol at the network drive.
So summarize: DokuWiki on-a-stick is for personal use only. It is meant to be run locally for a single user.
You can turn DokuWiki on-a-stick into a multi-user setup, but the access protocol for that has to be HTTP. That means running the webserver and PHP in a permanent fashion on a central server. If that server is not Windows based, you can not use the server included in the on-a-stick version. If it is based on windows you could reconfigure the included Apache, but you're probably better of doing a proper installation.
I hope this clears up things.