Preventing version Leakage when using Dokuwiki

As if not updating my blog for months at time wasn’t enough, I also maintain a wiki that gets even less attention 🙁

The software powering the wiki is Dokuwiki – a fantastic wiki software that’s very feature-rich (thanks to a plugin architecture) but very lightweight (everything is maintained in text files!)

There is however one mild annoyance – Dokuwiki insists on adding a Meta-header advertising the version number and there’s no direct way of turning this off:

Luckily there’s a plugin that can help – the metaheaders plugin. Unfortunately, the plugin does not ship with a configuration UI and the documentation on the plugin page is sparse. In order to disable the “generator” meta that Dokuwiki adds, here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a file called metaheaders.conf.php in the Dokuwiki conf directory. If you are using the dokuwiki package in Debian, the metaheaders.conf.php needs to go into the /etc/dokuwiki directory.

2. Add the following lines to the metaheaders.conf.php file:

<?php
$clear[] = array ( 'name' => 'generator' );

3. Clear the dokuwiki cache – you can do this by issuing a touch command on each txt file in the pages directory under /path/to/dokuwiki/data/pages (or /var/lib/dokuwiki/data/pages in Debian). Or, you can take the nuclear option and remove the cache directory entirely (/var/lib/dokuwiki/data/cache in Debian). Either way, once you’ve done this – you can trigger a full refresh of the page in your browser and check the page headers: