The MediaWiki installation on Debian uses a file structure all over the system and symbolic links to enable/disable extensions/configs etc. I understand this is because Debian has preferred locations for user-editable vs. “standard” configs/files etc., and is set up for multi-site capabilities etc.

I want to copy a live mediawiki install over to a local “stage” site on a Virtual machine running Debian. I have the “bare bones” mediawiki running, and have even copied over the MySQL Database with success. However the extensions, skins, images etc. are missing. Since it’s a headless server I would like to tarball the files, download them, and extract them to their proper place on the VM – which is non-trivial to do on this system due to the complex/sprawling file heirarchy.

Has anyone done this, and can offer advice, scripts & appropriate tar command (preserving symlinks)? Not sure how to get tar to compress and extract the directories I need with symlinks properly.

The debian mediawiki page describes some of the directories and a bit of the symlinking (confusingly stating that “Most core files from /usr/share/mediawiki are symlinked into this directory”…).