Many operating systems (OSes) have package managers that offer a DokuWiki package.

The advantages of using such a package are:

• OS-specific issues are generally handled in the package.
• Often dependencies are automatically installed.

But there are disadvantages as well:

• Often the packages contain out-of-date versions of DokuWiki.
• When manually upgrading such a DokuWiki installation there may be conflicts with the package mechanism. These may lead to upgrades being overwritten by older versions in the package.
• Often there is a default version of PHP associated with the the packaged version of DokuWiki. But this version may not be the newest compatible version of PHP available for the OS.

So an admin needs to decide whether to use an OS package or a manual method for installing DokuWiki.

Using the package is generally easier and gets your DokuWiki up and running faster. But for best results it may be better to install DokuWiki manually.

Tip: Install DokuWiki using a package and note the OS-specific things this package does. Then apply that to your manual install. This wastes a bit of disk space by having an unused version of DokuWiki and potentially some unused dependencies installed. But in most cases that is negligible.