First follow the instructions
Moin has provided instructions for common usage. Try creating a wiki using the default values within the instructions. Your wiki would then be stored where ours is, and named mywiki ... but you can change that place, and this name, AFTER you have a working wiki. The default values have been chosen carefully to work for most people on most platforms, or at least be a good start.
Change one thing at a time
When your wiki is running, go and customize it to your needs, but remember to change only one option at a time. You probably don't fully understand how all options work, and if you go and break few things in the same step, you will have hard time to fix it.
Check That Your Webserver Can Use Python
This is also in HelpOnInstalling/BasicInstallation. Use this script:
#!/bin/sh echo Content-Type: text/plain echo echo "Your web server is running as:" id echo "CGI scripts work" echo "Now we try to invoke Python interpreters and get their versions:" python -V 2>&1 python2.3 -V 2>&1 python2.4 -V 2>&1 echo "Finished."
The most common problem you might encounter is when you have an old Python version installed into "/usr", and a newer Python distribution into "/usr/local"; this is typical for GNU/Linux distributions that still come bundled with an old Python version.
In that case, if you enter "python" on your prompt, you will usually get the more recent Python interpreter, because "/usr/local/bin" is in your PATH. The situation is different in your webserver environment, and thus you might have to change the bang path of "moin.cgi", like this:
When installing, make sure you install with the version of python you want to run moin with. python setup.py install will install with the first python in the path, which may be the version you expect or not! /usr/local/bin/python2.4 will install in specific python. You will have to use the same path in the moin server script.
Missing file permissions
If you are root, the installed files may be readable only by root, but they must also be readable by the web server before the wiki will work. This includes both the Python modules and the site itself. For the data directory, the wiki engine also needs write access. To fix this, first find out where the Python module directory is; look in install.log, or run the command:
Set Your Variables Carefully
Be especially careful when you retype instead of cut and paste. Quoting errors in wikiconfig.py can cause things to fail. The following items are also variable issues. Also, some features only work if they are enabled by their option in either wikiconfig.py or farmconfig.py.
moin.cgi found, Moin doesn't run
CSS files do not work
Very common error is missing CSS styles. Your wiki look bare and ugly, unlike this nice wiki. In most cases, you did broke the configuration by not reading the instructions, or by trying to customize the instructions because you are smarter then us.
The fix is very easy: make sure your Apache Alias and ScriptAlias are NOT the same. This Apache setup will never work:
Alias is used to server static files: css, images etc. ScriptAlias is used to hide moin.cgi from the url. You must use different values! You can use anything you like for ScriptAlias, or Alias, but Alias must match the url_prefix configuration option. Here is an example that works (the default):