I've got a wordpress site that I have been using for a year now and it is hosted with HostGator. I have got a few tests i would like to run on the site, but I would like to test it offline using wamp first before making it LIVE.
The problem is previously I was always making changes to the LIVE site, usually at hours when I get little to no traffic. However, that has changed now and I do get traffic most hours through out a 24hr day.
So my problem is:
How do i download my existing website to laptop (wamp) and make those changes with new theme? (total newbie, sorry!)
I use Windows 7, so not sure what I need to be doing to get the site working like a live site offline.
Once I have implemented the new changes, what is the best way to upload the updated site back to the HostGator server without having any downtime or errors for site visitors?
Is there anything else I need to install or do inorder for this to work? I hope you can give me as much information as possible or any links to any guides or articles that explain how to do this.
Thanks so much for any help you can offer!!!
If you're using Hostgator, the process is simple:
Install XAMPP or WAMPP on your computer;
Go to your cPanel, backup and download your website;
Extract the backup to your computer, specially the homedir and the sql;
Go to your local environment, access http://localhost/phpmyadmin
Create a new database, doesn't matter the name but for the example let's call it "database";
Inside that database, import the one taken from the backup;
create a new folder inside your htdocs with the name of your website, "example.com";
Extract the content of the homedir there;
edit wp-config with the following data:
Host: 'localhost'
Username: 'root'
Password: blank
access http://localhost/example.com
You can check a good tutorial about the subject here.
About putting the site live, I recommend you to use a GIT repository, however it's understandable that might be a little complicated and perhaps too much work for what you're trying to achieve.
Try to move your files directly from your local to live environment using Filezilla or WinSCP, the drag and drop should replace the files live and the downtime should be minimal.
Instead of WAMP, you can always use VirtualBox to install CentOS or Ubuntu/Debian.
You can go one further and install either CentminMod to automate creating a LAMP, or a full panel like ISPConfig or Virtualmin.
That take care of create the environment.
Create a new account on the LAMP, using the same domain name.
You can FTP with Windows to get the files, but networking Windows and Linux is a pain. The better option is to use the command line (CLI) in the Linux VM to ftp the files from Hostgator to the VM. This guide will help with that process: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/FTP-3.html
Then your only concern is the MySQL database. And for this, you have several options.
For me, the easiest is to buy (or try!) SQLyog on Windows, and then copy the database from the Hostgator source to the localhost destination. Some mild networking is needed for Windows to see the Linux VM, but nothing as complex as file sharing (the FTP issue). SQLyog is far quicker than backing up the database, then restoring it -- especially since you can run into memory issues doing it this way. It fully depends on the size of the database.
The cheap/free backup>restore method is to use phpMyAdmin.
WordPress also has plugins, of varying cost, but you still have the possible backup>restore memory issue there as well.
When done, just copy it the other way, again using SQLyog and CLI ftp. You'll still have some downtime, but it will hopefully be minimal.
As a newbie, this probably seems like rocket science, but at least it gives you a good place to start. Welcome to the world of locally dev'ing sites!
Related
We are developing a moodle site. We are a group of 5 people and each one is working on different module locally. But now we wwant to integrate the work of all in one machine or server. Is there any way to version control it or integrate it as the databse of each one is different because of different data. Please provide the solutuion as early as possible.
It is not completely clear as to whether you are separately working on the content of the site or the code for the new site, so I will attempt to answer both questions.
For content the easiest way to integrate it all together into one site is to use the Moodle backup and restore mechanism ( http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/Course_backup ) - backup each of the courses and then restore them onto the main site. If you have a lot of courses to transfer, then it may make more sense to write some code to automate certain aspects of this, but that can be quite a bit of work, so usually it is easier to just manually do the backup and restore.
For code the answer is Git. All the core Moodle code is version controlled via git. Make sure that each developer is working with their own clone of your main git repository (you can find the core Moodle repository at . Once they have committed each of their changes, then they can be pushed (to a central repository) or pulled to your production site. Read more at http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Git_for_developers
Note that if the code for each module has been written with the proper DB installation / upgrade code ( http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Upgrade_API ) then it should simply be possible to take the code from each of the developed modules, put them together into one codebase and then create a fully-working fresh install. Once you have that, you should be able to use backup and restore to transfer any required courses from the development servers to the live server.
Hi guys I've dumped (made a backup) of my Appengine datastore entities,following this tutorial, now I wonder if there is a way to restore the data locally ? so I can do some test and debug.
In windows, the datastore is in the directory
C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Temp\AppName
In OSx this question can help you
In this directory are storade the datastore.db (the local storage), change the name (the app should not be running, and if is locked, kill all the python process)
Now go to the appengine dashboard
click in your app link
click in Blob Viewer (i'm assumming that you did the backup into a blobstore)
click in the file name
click in download
rename the file to datastore.db
copy to the previous path
start the app
Remote API (as koma mentions) is the main GAE-documented approach, and it's a good approach. Alternatively, you can download the entities using the cloud download tool, write your own store reader/deserializer, and execute it within your dev server local instance: http://gbayer.com/big-data/app-engine-datastore-how-to-efficiently-export-your-data. Read the part about the New Approach...
While these options are not automatic and require engineering, I really wanted to point out the side effect of doing this: We have been facing performance issues in the local development server for months now, specifically when the datastore has more than 1,000 entities with over 50 indexes. Just search for "require_indexes slow" and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I'm sure you have a solid reason to import lots of data locally for testing and debugging, just wanted to let you know your application will perform extremely slow, and debug mode will be impossibly slow; we can't even use debug mode with our setup anymore.
If you want to get some test data in your local db, you could copy some using the remote api
This is a subject of common discussion, but through all my research I have not actually found a sound answer to this.
I develop my websites offline, and then launch them live through my hosting account.
I utilize codeigniter, and on that basis there are some fundamental differences between my offline and online copies, namely base urls and database configurations. As such I cannot simply develop and test my websites offline and then upload them as it requires small configuration changes which are easy to overlook and good lead to a none working live website.
The other factor is that when I am developing offline, I might add a database table or a column whilst creating some functionality. When I upload my local developments to my host, they often do not work as I have forgotten to upload the new database structure. Obviously this cannot happen - there cannot be any opportunity for a damaged or broken live website.
Further to this, I'd like to be able to have logs of my development - version control of sorts such that if i develop a feature, and then something else stops working I can easily look backwards to at least see the code changes which could have caused the change.
My fourth requirement is as follows: if i go away on holiday for a week without my development laptop, and then get a bug report, I have no way of fixing it. If i fix it on the live copy, not only is it dangerous, but i'll inevitably not update it on my local copy - as such when i update my live copy next time, that change will be lost. Is there a way that on any computer i can access my development setup, edit and test, launch to the live site, whilst also committing it such that my laptop local copy is up to date.
So yes.. in general im looking for a solution to make my development processes more efficient/suitable. Any ideas?
Thanks
Don't deploy by simply copying. Deploy by using a script (I use Apache Ant) that will automate the copy of specific files for each environment, the replacement of some values, etc.
This just needs rigor. Make a todo list while developing, and check that every modification on the server is done. You might also test the deploy procedure on a pre-production server which has an similar configuration as the production server, make sure everything is OK, and then apply the same, tested procedure on the production server
Just use a version control system. SVN or Git are two free candidates.
Make your version control server available from anywhere. If it's an open-source project, free hosting solutions exist. Of course, if you don't have a development computer wvailable, you'll have to checkout the whole project, and probably install some tools to be able to develop, test and deploy. Just try to make it as easy as possible, or always have your laptop available. If you plan to work, have your toolbox with you. If you don't plan to work, then don't work. When you have finished some development, commit to the server. When you go back to your laptop, update your working copy from the server.
Small additions and clarifications to JB
Use any VCS, which can work (in a good way) with branches - your local and prod systems are good candidates for separate branches, where you share common code but have branch-specific config. It'll require some changes in your everyday workflow (code in "test", merge finished with "prod", deploy /by tools, not hand/ only after merge...), but it's fair price
Changing of workflow, again. As JB noted - don't deploy by hand, don't deploy wrong branch, don't deploy "prod" before finished merge. But now build-tools are rather smart, you can check such pre-condition inside builder
Just use VCS, maybe DVCS will be somehow better. I say strong "No-no" for Git as first VCS, but you have wide choice even without it - SVN (poor branch|merge comparing to DVCS), Bazaar (not a tool of my dream, but, who knows), Mercurial, Fossil SCM, Monotone
Don't work on live, never do anyting outside your SCM. One source of changes is a rule of happy developer. Or don't work at all at free-time, or have codebase always reacheable for you (free code-hosting /GoogleCode, SourceForge, BitBucket, Github, Assembla, LaunchPad/ or own server), get it as needed, change, save, deploy
I have just completed (basically) a beginner's database application with SQL Server and Visual C#. I am using Visual C# Express, not the full-scale Visual Studio thing, which apparently makes deploying the application properly a bit more complicated. I've seen where some other people have asked about how to deploy such an application from that IDE, but I'm not able to fully understand and use some of the answers that they've been getting back.
Therefore I must ask how to deploy this application properly, but I must also ask that there be a simple walkthrough given. College doesn't teach much about how to deploy these things, so I'm very newbish at it. Thanks!
I don't know of an automated way to deploy the database. If it's the first time the database is hitting the server, I backup on the source, and restore on the target...simple.
As far as the code, here's what I do:
Publish (right-click, Publish) the code to a local directory (I use C:\Websites\SiteName).
Use and ftp client to promote the output to the server.
Make any necessary adjustments to the web.config to point correctly to your target database.
When and if you need to make changes later, you might want to consider a tool I use for this purpose, BeyondCompare. It can perform a diff between your local files and the target site via FTP, and tell you exactly what you need to deploy to make it work. This won't detect changes in your db, however, though there are plenty of Sql diff tools along the same lines. My general principle is "make the local site work perfectly, and then make the target site just like the local site".
Things to watch for in #3 above are that the target address is right in the connection string, along with whatever security credentials you will need to connect to the db.
HTH.
I do my web development and testing on my laptop running an installation of xampp - I upload things to my host, but I always go through cpanel's file manager to do it. I realize that there's definitely a better way to go about it, but I need to be pointed in the right direction to do so, also other tips on how to manage stuff would be appreciated.
FTP - can I keep my site's stuff synched to a local directory on htdocs so I can keep my site backed up on my computer yet update the site with whatever changes I make locally? Can anyone recommend a good client (preferably free) that I can use to do this?
Database stuff - how do I backup / sync databases in the same way? Ideally I'd like to do the same thing as with my files. Merge / upload whatever I've developed with a click or two. Is this possible? Is this wise?
Any help and advice would be appreciated. :)
I do my development in Eclipse which allows me to combine development and sync via FTP in one environment. It will also tell you if a file changed on the server and allow you to decide whether to override it or not. You can also disable the syncing of certain types of files with pattern matching and use other technologies like WebDAV or SSH to sync (if supported by your host of course).