Cloud Wiki was originally designed to run inside its own web server, and accept requests via either a reverse proxy, like Apache 2.0's mod_proxy, or from a few well behaved clients. This provides several major speed benefits, since it removes the overhead of loading Python each time a new request is received and ensures that only one Cloud Wiki process will be reading the database at any time, but in some situations it may be difficult to deploy Cloud Wiki in this fashion -- generally when dealing with bottom tier web hosts that restrict their clients to using CGI for dynamic content.
Cloud Wiki can run as a CGI, with a modicum of preparation, using the cloud.py CGI script.
If your hosting provider will permit you to install to the Python site-packages directory, you may use Python's distutils utility to deploy Cloud Wiki using the following from the root of your Cloud Wiki distribution:
python setup.py install
Otherwise, you will have to extract Cloud Wiki to a directory. It is strongly suggested that you place this directory somewhere that is not inside the document root of your webserver, but it should be in a location that will be accessible with the effective user privileges of your web server. If you don't know what this means, please, stop here and consult with your system administrator.
You will want a directory to contain your wiki's database, its stylesheet, and transaction log file. This directory must be writable with the effective permissions of your database, due to a peculiarity of Pysqlite, and must also be readable and executable by the web server. In this directory, you will want to copy the style.css file distributed with Cloud Wiki, and edit to suit your tastes, then you will want to create a new database using the following command:
cloud-wiki -i -d <wiki-db-path> config
Cloud Wiki must know roughly where it will be mapped in the web server's hierarchy so it can refer browsers to the stylesheet, and the front page of your wiki. If, for example, your Wiki would be found at "http://www.myhost.com/cgi-bin/cloud.py", you would want to use the following:
cloud-wiki -d <wiki-db-path> config base-url:/cgi-bin/cloud.py
You can safely omit the http://<host>:<port> portion of the URL, here -- most web clients will silently insert this for relative URLs. The leading forward slash will ensure that it works from the base directory of your web server's namespace, however.
Copy the cloud.py file to your CGI directory, and make sure it will be executable by the web server. On POSIX, the following command will do:
chmod 0755 cloud.py
Note that you may need to rename this file, or alter your server configuration to handle Python CGI scripts.
Revise the variables listed in cloud.py to point to the location of the cloud_wiki, database and log files for your wiki.
This node is a part of the cloud wiki manual.