free.fr is a popular french hosting provider, giving away free hosting plans. Unfortnately free.fr cripples their PHP configuration beyond anything that can be supported by DokuWiki.

As of 2013/07/21, the latest PHP version available at free.fr is PHP 5.1.3RC4-dev. DokuWiki version 2013-05-10a “Weatherwax” and up require PHP 5.2 at least. The latest DokuWiki version that can be installed is 2012-10-13 “Adora Belle”.

DokuWiki will not run on free.fr out of the box.

We recommend using alternative hosters.

Please do not report any bugs regarding running DokuWiki on free.fr before making sure that they still exist when using a different provider.

Some people had success with changing parts of DokuWiki to work around some limitations of free.fr. More info about this can be found in these forum threads:

* liberatator (french forum). A tool to patch any version of DokuWiki. Restrictions due to PHP versions still apply.

Those references are older but may still be useful :

• Hébergement chez Free
• Fatal error mkdir(.../data/locks/...) ... File exists
• Patch pour free.fr
• Solution pour free.fr, dokuwiki toute version, (pas un patch)

A list of websites on Free.Fr which run DokuWiki, successfully, is collected here.

The most serious, currently unsolved limitation of patched DokuWiki 2009-02-14 on Free.Fr is, that the media manager of DokuWiki corrupts “big” media files during loading, see here. No verification of this bug for patched DokuWiki 2008-05-05 so far.