Semantic MediaWiki was installed and enabled but is missing an appropriate upgrade key.

Issue[edit]

Semantic MediaWiki issues the following error message:1

Error » Semantic MediaWiki

Semantic MediaWiki was installed and enabled but is missing an appropriate upgrade key.

Release

SMW_VERSION (smw:2019-09-23)

This issue appears if your hoster configured PHP to use the common gateway interface (CGI) instead of the command line interface (CLI).2 Semantic MediaWiki is relying on the latter.

This error message may also appear when you have renamed the database after setting up SMW successfully, which may be the case if for instance, you have changed environment. Running update.php and setupStore.php may fail. The issue is that the correct database name should be reflected in the setup information file (.smw.json), which is located in the extension folder by default. The first entry in that json file is the database name, possibly followed by a hyphen and database prefix.

Solution[edit]

Make sure that you are using PHP from the command line interface (CLI). Contact your hosting provider on how do do this.3

References

^ Semantic MediaWiki: GitHub issue gh:smw:4679
^ Determine whether PHP is being run via HTTP or CLI.
^ Why does PHP_SAPI not equal 'cli' when called from a cron job?