Blog Design Studio

At Blog Design Studio, we follow certain procedures for developing the WordPress themes & plugins. Today, I’m posting one of the procedure that we follow to clone the live location of our client’s WordPress install to a test location.

That way, we can continue the development without worrying about disturbing the user experience of the visitors and once the development is done, we clone the test location back to the live location. That’s how we minimize bugs & issues. I’ll post the guide to clone the testing location back to live location as well, however will release that next week. You can subscribe to our newsletter to ensure that you don’t miss it!

Purpose: We want to clone the blog from live location to another folder with in current webhost. This ensures the development can be done with minimum bugs. For e.g. http://blog.com will be cloned to http://blog.com/testlocation/ and it will function in exact same fashion as http://blog.com

Pre-requisites:

• SSH enabled FTP account. SSH is secure shell that gives access to the linux servers thus making the process a little technical but fast, secure and we face less issues.
• Domain name access
• Web host control panel access for access to database.
• Putty – Windows based software to access SSH. Download here. [choose A Windows Installer]
• FileZilla – FTP software | Download here.

Example settings:

1. FTP account with ssh
1. Username: bdstest
2. Password: bdstest123456
3. Public folder location – /public_html/
4. Test folder location – /public_html/test/
2. CPanel account details
1. Domain name: http://bdstest.com
2. Server IP : 202.143.12.34 {this is made up}
3. CPanel URL: http://202.143.12.34/cpanel/ [not every webhost comes with CPanel, some come with their own control panel – so you’ll have to follow the instructions accordingly or contact web host]
4. Username : bdscpanel
5. Password: bdscpanel123

Pointers –

· SSH commands are in Italics

Process to follow –

1. Make the backup of files
2. Extract the backup of files
3. Export the database
4. Create a new database
5. Import the backup of database
6. Change the URL structure of the database
7. Put new database settings in wp-config
8. Block Search engines
9. Create a new user in live location
10. Upgrade WordPress

Process Starts –

1. Making the back-up: The first step is to ensure that we make the backup of all the files. We’ll connect through SSH and will navigate to the folder where WordPress is installed and will run these commands -

• Open Putty [enter the ip address of server or domain name at the place shown in picture 1] & click Open
• Enter the SSH enabled username & password.
• ls {lists the files & folders}
• cd public_html {change directory from existing to public_html}
• tar -cvf wholeblog.tar ./ (this will ensure that all the files in the folder gets packed in a file called wholeblog.tar)
• mkdir test {creates a folder in public_html with the name test}
• Don’t close the putty window.

2. Extract the back-up: Now we’ll move the backup file i.e. wholeblog.tar to test folder & will extract the files.

• Open Filezilla
• Enter the server details to connect to the server and go to public_html folder.
• Drag and drop the file wholeblog.tar to test folder
• Go back to the putty window and type the following commands –
• cd test
• tar –xvf wholeblog.tar

3. Export the database: We’ll use phpMyadmin to export the database.

• Go to CPanel i.e. http://202.143.12.34/cpanel/
• Enter username & password
• Scroll down and find phpMyAdmin
• If asked for username & password enter then accordingly. If you don’t remember it, you can find the information in wp-config.php, which is stored in /public_html/ folder.
• From the main login screen, select ‘Databases’
• Now click the name of your database – or your WordPress database if you have several databases. (Your screen may look slightly different, depending on the version.)
• click the ‘Export’ tab on the top set of tabs. (1a)
• Look at the left box at the top of the Export section. All the tables in the database you selected are in that box. Click on Select All (1b)
• Tick the ‘Save as file’ option, “gzipped” radio button and leave the template name as is. (1c)
• Now click ‘Go’ and you should be prompted for a file to download. Save the file to your computer.
• Depending on the database size, this may take a few moments.
• You have now backed up your database.

(click for bigger picture)

4. Create a new database: Creating a new database is pretty simple with the help of CPanel.

• Go back to Cpanel.
• Look for MySQL Database Wizard & click it.
• Step 1 -> type the name of the database and click Next.
• Step 2 -> type the username , generate the password and then click Create User.
• Step 3 -> Click All Privlidges & click Next.
• Ensure all the information is stored somewhere safe and then click on “Return to Home”

5. Import the backup database: In this step we’ll import the database that we exported in step 3.

• Login to phpMyAdmin.
• Click databases, and select the database that you created in step 4.
• Across the top of the screen will be a row of tabs. Click the Import tab.
• On the next screen will be a Location of Text File box, and next to that a button named Browse.
• Click Browse. Locate the backup file stored on your computer.
• Make sure the SQL radio button is checked.
• Click the Go button.

6. Change the URL Structure: This is required to change the URL stored in the database from http://bdstest.com to http://bdstest.com/test/

• go to SQL tab and run these sql queries one by one –
• UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’, ‘http://www.new-domain.com’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ‘siteurl’;
• UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, ‘http://www.olddomain.com’,'http://www.newdomain.com’);
• UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’, ‘http://www.new-domain.com’);

Note: if you are making the clone in a sub-folder then then URL in the queries should be like this – http://www.new-domain.com/subfolder [there should be no trailing slash at the end]. In our example old domain will be http://bdstest.com & the new domain will be http://bdstest.com/test

7. Modify settings in wp-config.php: Now’s the time to change the settings of wp-config in test location.

• Go to /public_html/test/ using Filezilla.
• Right click on wp-config.php & select View/Edit.
• File will open in default text editor.
• Put the new values of database that you created in step 4 – You would need to change, the database username, database password and database name.
• Click Save.
• Exit Filezilla.
• Open the test location to verify if everything is correct or not!

8. Block Search engines: We need to ensure that search engines don’t crawl the site.

• Go to /public_html/ using filezilla
• Look for robots.txt , if it’s not present, we’ll create a new file and will upload it to /public_html/ folder.
• Open a text editor (like notepad on Windows) and create a new text document
• Save the text document with exactly the name robots.txt
• Paste the following text in that file –
• User-agent: *
  Disallow: /test
• Save the file, Upload the robots.txt to public_html.
• Verify the robots.txt location by going to http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.COM/robots.txt
• If you have the robots.txt already, then just add the text in step 3 mentioned above.

9. Create a new user in original location: There are situations where the original site can’t stop posting new articles. To avoid any issues, we should create a new user and all the future articles should be posted using that new user.

• Go to WordPress dashboard of original location
• Go to Users->Add User
• Username (required) – Enter the username of the new user here. This will also be used as the Login name of the new user.
• E-mail (required) – Enter a valid e-mail address of the new user here. The e-mail address must be unique for each user. If a published post or page is authored by this user, then when approved comments are made to that post or page, a notification e-mail is sent to this e-mail address.
• First Name – Enter the first name of the new user here.
• Last Name – Enter the last name of the new user in this text box.
• Website -: You may enter the new user’s website URL in this text box.
• Password (twice) – Enter a password for the new user twice here, once in each text box.
• Send Password? – Check the box to Send this password to the new user by email.
• Role – Select the desired Role for this User from the drop-down box.
• Click Add User

10. Upgrade WordPress to latest Version of test location: It’s best that one upgrades to the latest version of WordPress. The test location is the best place to find out if that’s possible or not.

• Go to WordPress dashboard
• Go to Dashboard->updates
• Click on Update automatically
• If you want, you can update all the plugins as well, however its a possibility that some things will break or change the way they used to work. So, be prepared to expect issues or probably new features as well.