Meza

Meza is MediaWiki EZ Administration

For the past couple years, we've been the primary maintainer and have successfully pushed our contributions upstream to NASA.

Why Meza is More Valuable Than Simply Downloading MediaWiki

Enterprise-Grade Deployment Automation

MediaWiki alone: Manual installation, configuration files to edit by hand, extension management is manual and error-prone.

Meza: Single meza deploy monolith command that orchestrates:

• MediaWiki core installation with proper versions
• 100+ pre-configured, battle-tested extensions
• Automated database setup and updates
• Web server configuration (Apache/PHP-FPM)
• Search integration (Elasticsearch/CirrusSearch)
• Automatic TLS security certificate provisioning
• Full logs and audit trails for change management

Production-Ready Extension Stack

Meza automatically installs and configures:

• VisualEditor with proper Parsoid integration
• Semantic MediaWiki with property rebuild capabilities
• CirrusSearch for enterprise search
• Flow for modern discussions
• 50+ other extensions with tested configurations

See more on the features page.

MediaWiki alone: You'd spend weeks researching, installing, and configuring each extension individually.

Multi-Environment Management

# Meza supports multiple environments out-of-the-box
meza deploy production
meza deploy staging  
meza deploy development

Each environment has separate:

• Configuration hierarchies (/opt/conf-meza/public/<env>/ and /opt/conf-meza/secret/<env>/) making it so simple to have development tools and settings for your 'development' environment while your 'production' environment is configured separately. Meza configuration operates with inheritance and overrides.
• Database backups (automated before updates)
• Deploy locks to prevent conflicts

Operational Excellence

Automated maintenance (logged):

• Database backups before each deployment
• update.php runs for all wikis automatically
• Search index rebuilding
• Semantic data rebuilding
• Log rotation and cleanup for all services

MediaWiki alone: All maintenance is manual scripting.

Multi-site Architecture

Meza supports multiple sites in one deployment:

sites: meta, biz, demo, policy

Each gets:

• Separate databases
• Individual configuration
• Shared extension stack
• Unified management

Infrastructure as Code through Ansible

Meza uses Ansible playbooks and role-based configuration to manage complex MediaWiki deployments, rather than manual LocalSettings.php editing.

The actual complexity Meza manages includes:

• 40+ Ansible roles for different components
• Dynamic path resolution and configuration hierarchies
• Per-wiki configuration directories (/opt/conf-meza/public/wikis/<wikiId>/) with inheritance
• Jinja2 templating for generating MediaWiki configuration

vs. MediaWiki: Manual LocalSettings.php editing (on each node?) possibly with no version control integration.

Enterprise Security & Scalability

• Multi-server deployments: Load balancers, database clustering, GlusterFS
• SSL automation: Let's Encrypt integration
• Access controls: Fine-grained permission management
• Backup strategies: Automated, tested restore procedures

Time to Value

• MediaWiki download: Days/weeks to get a production-ready wiki
• Meza: Minutes to deploy, hours to customize

Meza offers a complete enterprise MediaWiki deployment with search, visual editing, semantic capabilities, and operational tooling - all from a single command. That's the Meza value proposition.

PHP is the HyperText Preprocessor = the most popular programming language for the web

Transport Layer Security

Secure Sockets Layer = secure (encrypted) underpinning for HTTP