XWiki is a Java-based wiki and runs on a Servlet Container such as Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, etc. It also uses a relational database to store its content. It can run on almost any database (HSQL, MySQL, etc) but XWiki and the database need to be setup correctly.

There are 3 ways of installing XWiki:

• Use the Standalone distribution which already packages a Servlet Container (Jetty) and a database (HSQL). This is the recommended option for first time XWiki users and for users who wish to quickly try out XWiki.
• Use the WAR distribution and configure both your container and your database to work with it.
• Use the .deb package to install the last version of XWiki and the dependencies.

If you're instead upgrading an existing XWiki install check the Upgrade instructions page.

Pick one of the trails in the outline on the right to get started.

Once you've finished the installation check the other topics in the Admin Guide for configuring and securing your wiki.

Prerequisites

• Java 6 or greater installed.
• A Servlet Container supporting Servlet 2.4
• Memory:
  • Small installs: A minimum of 300MB of heap memory and 196MB of permGen (-Xmx300m -XX:MaxPermSize=196m)
  • Medium installs: 512MB for the heap and 196MB of permGen (-Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=196m)
  • Large installs: 800MB for the heap and 196MB of permGen (-Xmx800m -XX:MaxPermSize=196m). Try not to ge beyond 1024MB since adding more memory means more GC time and thus lower performance. In general for performance tuning see the Performance Guide

  Warning

  Note that storing attachments with the default (in database) storage mechanism is very memory intensive. See the administrators guide to attachments for more information about memory cost and the alternative filesystem based attachment store.

• Check the release notes for the version you're installing to see what browsers and databases are supported for it. You can also check our general support strategy.

Tutorials

Tutorials are step by step procedures to install XWiki for a specific configuration. You can choose to follow one of them or follow the instructions in the sections below.

• XWiki On Windows (French)
• XWiki On Debian 4 (Etch) - Tomcat - PostgreSQL (or MySQL) (English)
• XWiki On Debian 4 (Etch) - Tomcat - PostgreSQL (or MySQL) (German)
• XWiki On Windows - GlassFish - Oracle (Russian)
• XWiki on OpenSUSE - Tomcat - MySQL (English)

Installation Methods

Using a standalone distribution 

It provides a built-in XWiki, with a portable database and a lightweight Java container.
A standalone distribution is not recommended in a production environment. If you need to use it in a production basis, you may look at the two other options.

Using .war package (usable for production)

It provides a java application package that has to be installed in a Java container (such as Tomcat). This can be used on almost any operating system.

Using .deb package (usable for production)

It provides a .deb package that can be used on a Debian-based operating system. It can be installed with dpkg or apt; installation is thus automated.

Troubleshooting

You can verify some basic settings of your XWiki installation (on Tomcat, MySQL) using the Admin Tools application. Keep in mind that some of these tools only work in a Linux environment.

Running multiple instances of XWiki in the same container

If you get this error:

You need to edit WEB-INF/cache/infinispan/config.xml for each instance of XWiki, and change the jmxDomain value (found under the globalJmxStatistics tag) to have a unique name.

Running XWiki behind proxy-server

Extension manager relies on remote repositories for searching and fetching available extensions, so if your XWiki is installed in a network accessing the internet through proxy-server, most likely extensions search will return you nothing and log files will contain connection refused exceptions.

In such cases you should configure XWiki to know your proxy-server.

XWiki uses default Java proxy configuration through Apache httpclient. See the Java Networking and Proxies documentation for more details.
The main idea is to add a set of proxy-related properties to system scope.

E.g. for Tomcat 6 it could be done in the following way: modify /<tomcat-home>/bin/catalina.sh and added proxies to the JAVA_OPTS variable definition:

JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dappserver.home=$CATALINA_HOME -Dappserver.base=$CATALINA_HOME -Dhttp.proxyHost=proxy.mycompany.com -Dhttp.proxyPort=7777 -Dhttps.proxyHost=proxy.mycompany.com -Dhttps.proxyPort=7777 -Xmx1738m -Xms1738m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m $XWIKI_OPTS"