How to prevent MediaWiki from redirecting the main domain to the "Main Page"?

Question

I see a lot of questions about how to change the title of a MediaWiki Main Page or how to redirect it to another page, but I can't seem to find anything on how to 1) prevent MediaWiki from redirecting the main domain to the "Main Page", and 2) display a stand-alone page under the main domain.

In other words, how to do exactly what Wikipedia does when you go to www.wikipedia.org

Instead of redirecting you to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page", it displays a stand-alone custom page.

How can I do that with MediaWiki?

Answer 1

www.wikipedia.org is not quite a relevant example, because it's not even served by MediaWiki.

That said, the solution is simple: you need to locally alter the page [[MediaWiki:Mainpage]] with content "Title", then index.php will redirect to [[Title]].

If the target must not be served by MediaWiki, or if you want to catch all requests to the domain root before they even hit MediaWiki, you'll need to edit your redirect/shorturl rules so that /, index.php, [[Title]] etc. redirect to the desired target.