Copying Magento website to test account

NetHosted Customer Joined: 09 Oct 2011 Posts: 4

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone could help me with the following, or point me towards a relevant existing topic (I checked the forum but couldn't find it).

I have 2 accounts with Nethosted, 1 for my live Magento website and 1 for development/test purposes. The test account has its own, different domain.

What would be the best/easiest way to use my test account, i.e.:
1) How to completely copy my website to my test account (ideally I'd like to be able to choose weather or not to include the complete database/products )
2) How to transfer (parts of) the website back to my live website once I (e.g updates/additions that have been developed successfully on my test account).

I tried making a complete backup of my website through the c-panel and using 'Restore' on my test account (homepage & database) but this doesn't seem to work?

Sorry, I don't even know weather this should be straightforward or very complex; so please don't be too hard on me

Thanks a lot for your help in advance.

Guido

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1013

Hi,

There isn't a straightforward way to do this particularly, it's necessary to setup 2 separate sites, there are a number of reasons for this. Magento for example uses the site's URL to function correctly, it's not possible to have 2 sites setup on exactly the same URL so that means just copying the files across directly won't work, you'd need to copy them across and modify them to the new/old URL. You'd also want the test site to run from a different database, this means you need to setup the separate database and edit the connection settings so that it's not changing your live site database.

The method I would suggest to replicate your live site on a new URL for testing would be to take a full copy of your public_html/ and upload this into the new site directory. You then need to create a database and database user in cPanel MySQL Databases section once this is done, you will need to edit app/etc/local.xml to update the database settings to the newly created one. You will need to export your current database and then import it into the new database, this can be done through phpMyAdmin. Once you have imported it you will then need to search the database for the old URL and update all instances of this to the new one. You should also clear the var/cache/ and var/session/ folders for the new install.

This should be everything that's necessary, as you can see it's not a particularly simple process though, if you need further assistance you can let us know and we'll try to advise, the Magento community forums also contain a lot of useful info: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/ as does their knowledgebase: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/

Regards,

Darryl

NetHosted Customer Joined: 09 Oct 2011 Posts: 4

Thank you Darryl for your detailed and clear response.

It doesn't seem to be particularly simple indeed, though I think I do recognise the steps you are referring to (well, to some extent at least) so I'm gonna give it a good try.

Thanks so much for your support, much appreciated!

Guido

Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2011 3:48 pm Post subject:

It sounds like you're at the stage where you would benefit from a VPS and using version control (e.g. Mercurial or Git) to track changes and pull them to your live site when you're happy with the dev site. I've been starting to get into this way of working over the last few months and it's great.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 09 Oct 2011 Posts: 4

Thanks for your suggestion David, very kind! I def will be looking into this as it sounds like a very good option.

Of course it also depends how easy the 'old style' replication goes; coincidentally I am working on it as we speak so I may make up my mind v soon

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