Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS (64bit) was used to write this documentation. You will still be able to run your own render server, this works just fine. When you are 'forced' into a MS Windows environment and you can't setup a Linux box you could use VirtualBox, or any other virtualization software on the Windows host and virtualize your Linux distro.

It is possible to setup a render server on many different Linux distro's or even on a MS Windows box but even with just some basic Linux know-how it is 'easier' to use a Linux distro. This document is an attempt to make the process more clear and hopefully a little less frustrating. Because of this setting up your own render server can be a little frustrating. There is documentation on the subject but depending on what you want your render server to do you need to combine a lot of sources on the web and several Talk pages on MediaWikia. If you can't or don't want to use a public render server it is relatively easy to setup your own render server. These extensions can use a public render server to render the output like the one at PediaPress used by MediaWiki and the Wikipedia websites.

The Pdf Export extension can also be used to output pages to pdf. It is also used on MediaWiki & the Wikipedia sites. The Collection extension is a way to download single pages or generate complete books from articles on your wiki.

It was tried with Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS but with mixed and unreliable results. You can still use Collection and this document describes how to set up your own render server on Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS (64bit). For details read Reading/Web/PDF Functionality. In the near future the Collection extension will be replaced by the ElectronPdfService extension.

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