Connecting Dradis to MediaWiki

Having a repository of common issue descriptions is a good way of saving time during the reporting phase of the engagement.

One of the options available to our users is to import issue descriptions from a MediaWiki instance.

In this guide we're going to cover how to connect your Dradis Professional appliance to a MediaWiki instance, how to structure your content and how to query and import entries from your wiki.

This guide contains:

• The result
• Get MediaWiki up and running
• Adding your first entries
• Configuring the connection
• Importing entries

The result

We want to be able to maintain a repository of issues in wiki instance somewhere in our network and we want to be able to import those issues from Dradis.

This will allow us to pull complete issue descriptions quickly from the wiki into our project.

We want to be able to use the Import new issue module in Dradis to pull data from the wiki:

Get MediaWiki up and running

Providing detailed instructions on setting up MediaWiki is outside the scope of this guide (see the "Installation guide":http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Installation on their website for a good starting point). However if all goes according to plan, these are the steps required:

1. Download the latest version of the app.
2. Uncompress in your web server (for instance under /var/www/mediawiki-1.21.2).
3. Point your browser to that directory: http://[domain]/mediawiki-1.21.2/index.php
4. Follow the instructions

You'll need to configure a database connection so MediaWiki can store its contents.

Adding your first entries

You can structure your entries however you want and use the field names you want. For instance, typically each entry will have:

• Title
• Description
• Recommendation
• Impact
• Probability
• ...

You can have other fields, CVSSv2, References... The important thing is that the fields in your entries repository match the fields in your report template.

Here is an example of what one of these entries should look like in the wiki format:

And also rendered inside the wiki:

We recommend that you create an index page with a reference to all the entries, but this is for your own convenience, it is not really required:

Configuring the connection

Once you have a few sample entries in your wiki, it is time to connect Dradis to it.

1. First, make sure that you've enabled the MediaWiki import add-on

2. Log into Dradis and create a new project for testing purposes, lets call it MediaWiki.

3. Open that project and click on the Settings icon in the upper-right corner of the window, then select Configure plugins:

   

   Configuration settings are sorted alphabetically, go to the bottom of the screen to locate the wiki-related ones:

   Field	Description	Default value
   fields	The fields in your entries	Title,Impact,Probability,Description,Recommendation
   host	The host name of the wiki server	localhost
   path	The path to the wiki install	/mediawiki/api.php
   port	The port number of your wiki server	80
   scheme	http vs https	http(s)

Importing entries

After providing all the relevant configuration you can navigate back to the Project and go to the All Issues page:

You can see the different search fields of the Import new issue module on the right-hand side of the window. Go down to the MediaWiki one and input some text and hit Enter. The results will be displayed underneath the search field:

Browse through the results, click on the one you're interested in to review the details, and click on the add issue link to import that entry into the project:

And the issue will appear in your Issues list: