You are strongly advised to use PmWiki on the latest stable PHP version, or at least a PHP version that is still supported with security updates. See supported PHP versions.

The latest PmWiki version is tested and should work with recent PHP versions. New PHP versions often introduce breaking changes for code that was previously valid. We keep updating the core, but if you see any warnings we didn't notice, please do report them to us.

Some Cookbook? recipes and complex skins? may break or show warnings after a PHP upgrade. If you have this problem, please see Troubleshooting on how to identify the recipes causing this, and check if the recipe has a more recent version, otherwise try reaching out to the recipe maintainer for assistance. You may find their contact details in the source code, or on their profile page.

Technical prerequisites for running the PmWiki wiki engine:

1. PHP 5.3 or later
   • for PHP 5.5 to 8.3 compatibility use the current version of PmWiki
2. Some sort of webserver that can run PHP scripts.

PmWiki has been reported to work with the following OS/webserver combinations:

• Apache 1.3 or 2.0, on roughly anything (Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X)
  • Apache 2.4 or later is recommended
• lighttpd (1.4.19 php-fastcgi ssl) on Linux
• nginx (0.8.47) on Windows (configuration example)
• Microsoft Internet Information Server, on Windows
• Linux + LiteSpeedWeb Server Standard Edition
• appWeb (a small, php-enabled webserver) executing on a Linksys NSLU2 Network Storage Link device
• Linux + Hiawatha

PmWiki can run on MacOSX on a web server with PHP, however if you allow international characters in page names and in uploaded file names, your installation may be difficult to migrate to a standard web server, because the file system uses a different encoding for international characters. Trying to move such an installation to another operating system may make pages and attached files with international characters in the name invisible to PmWiki or unreachable with a web browser.

The Standalone recipe provides a special, bare-bones webserver application that can be used to run PmWiki in places where another webserver isn't available. PmWiki can also be run from a USB drive.