Mediawiki: Want to use one database and have two Wiki's point to it

Factual Questions
1

I am trying to have a different look (different skin and so on) for multiple wikis while pointing them all to a single database.

I found this page which seems to spell it out but I am missing something.

My wiki is currently local only so to get to it I put in the URL:

http://localhost/testwiki1/index.php (clicking on that will not take you anywhere)

I want “testwiki2” to have a different look but use the same database as “testwiki1” above.

From the webpage above it says:

“Note: To link your subdomains to one directory on your server, you may have to edit the configuration file for your server (can not be done with a .htaccess file, try changing httpd-vhosts.txt there in Apache web server setup) or, if your site has its own IP address, modify the DNS configuration for your site.”

This is where I am confused.

What is it telling me to do? Do I need to make a Hosts file locally which points to these?

Something else?

Seems it should be easy but I am missing something.

Thanks in advance.

ETA: I would rather have the URL be testwiki1.mydomain.com and testwiki2.mydomain.com

Is that doable? Better? Worse?

2

You don’t want two different URLs pointing to the same location on the Web server. That would cause both sites to have the same files and thus the same look.

You want two different sites at two different locations on the server (two different folders) but both configured to use the same MySQL database connection.

I don’t know anything about MediaWiki, but I poked through the page you linked to and found a link to this article which shows you how to share a database between two different sites.