Moving a WordPress instance by hand
Over the years I’ve migrated a lot of WordPress sites. Although there are plugins that can take care of it, I have yet to find a more efficient way than just doing it by hand. The following is my recipe for migrating WordPress instances.
In the example we move a site to our local development environment.
Prerequisites
- Shell (usually SSH) access to the server that runs the WordPress instance
- PHP CLI (sudo apt install php-cli)
- WP-CLI
Obtaining code and DB from the source server
- Make a tarball of the site’s files:
tar czf example.com.tgz public_html
If it’s only for testing and you’re in a hurry, exclude the WP Uploads directory:tar czf example.com.tgz --exclude=**/wp-content/uploads/* public_html - Find database credentials:
grep DB_ public_html/wp-config.php - Using the found credentials, make a database dump:
mysqldump somedb -u someuser -p'somepassword' | gzip > example.com.sql.gz
Now copy the tarball and ‘sql-ball’ over to your machine.
Setting up local environment
- Unpack the WordPress instance:
tar xzf example.com.tgz - Create and import the database, e.g.:
sudo mysqladmin create example_com
zcat example.com.sql.gz | sudo mysql example_com - Update database credentials in wp-config.php
For local development, I usually just take user ‘root’ with an empty password (the Gods of Security frown upon me) - To not need HTTPS locally:
a. Remove any line containing “FORCE_SSL_ADMIN” from wp-config.php
b. Remove or rename (= deactivate) any plugin (from wp-content/plugins) that forces ssl, for instance ‘really-simple-ssl’ - Replace your WordPress base URL using wp-cli:
wp search-replace https://example.com http://localhost:8080 - Run the local development server:
wp server --port=8080
You should now be able to access the WordPress site by visiting http://localhost:8080 !
Optional, but handy
Create an admin user for yourself:wp user create myadmin [email protected] --role=administrator --user_pass=admin
Troubleshooting
If connecting to the database fails, it could be that an empty password is not accepted. As using root with an empty password is a bit of a hack, here’s another hack to make it work for newer versions of MySQL/MariaDB. Obtain a root MySQL shell and execute:
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Further (necessary) tweaking
See WordPress development tricks