🌐 Qwiki Manual
Administration Guide / Installation, Auto-Setup & Sub-Folder Deployment

Installation, Auto-Setup & Sub-Folder Deployment

Standalone Qwiki requires no database server, Composer install, or Node.js build step. You can deploy it at the root of a domain or inside any sub-folder on a standard PHP host.

System Requirements

  • PHP: PHP 7.4 or PHP 8.x
  • PHP Extensions: json, session, mbstring, fileinfo, and zip (required for 1-click updates and backups)
  • Web Server: Apache, Nginx, Caddy, or PHP's built-in CLI server for local evaluation

3-Step Installation

  1. Download and Extract: Download the latest release .zip from GitHub Releases and extract its contents into your web root (e.g., /var/www/html/) or a sub-folder (e.g., /var/www/html/docs/).
  2. Set Writable Permissions: Ensure the web server user can write configuration, user, content, and governance directories:
    chmod -R 775 /path/to/your/qwiki-folder
chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/qwiki-folder
  3. Open in Your Browser (Auto-Setup): Visit your deployment URL. On first request, Qwiki automatically detects a fresh installation, initializes qwiki.json and users.json, and populates content/ and uploads/ from demo-data/.

Location-Agnostic Sub-Folder Deployment

Because all stylesheets, scripts, navigation routes, and API calls resolve relative to the current installation directory, you can move a Standalone Qwiki installation between /, /help, /wiki, or /internal/kb without editing hardcoded base URLs.

Immediate Post-Install Security Checklist

Caution

Fresh installations ship with default administrator credentials (admin / admin). Immediately after your first login:

  1. Open admin ▾ ➔ 👤 Account & Security (or 👥 Users) and change the admin password.
  2. Review ⚙️ Settings ➔ 🔒 Access & Security to choose Public Access vs. Private Portal and configure your Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Policy.
  3. Optionally set a custom Documentation Portal Title and Logo in ⚙️ Settings ➔ 🌐 General.

For Apache, Nginx, and Caddy virtual-host recipes, see Apache, Nginx & Caddy Configuration Recipes.