A while back I setup mediawiki on debian etch. Recently I upgraded to MediaWiki 1.11.2-2 (ubuntu) from 1.7 (debian) and started having problems logging in. clicking on “login / create account” would return to an ‘index.php’ wiki page. Going to Special:Userlogin would give me the login page, but would say “No such action”, “The action specified by the URL is not recognized by the wiki” after submitting.

A few people have seen this in different circumstances. The most related thread I found to my problem mentions wgUsePathInfo.

I kept getting an error about a ‘redirect loop’ though, and finally realized my Apache rewrite configuration was using an absolute file path. I settled on this apache configuration combined with setting wgUsePathInfo to false in my LocalSettings.php:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(index.php|skins|images|icons|opensearch_desc.php|api.php|~.*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1 [L]