[support] How portable are drupal web sites?

[Larry Garfield]

1) Disable clean URLs, clear the cache, set logs to a short lifetime, then run 
cron to clear old ones.  (All but the first one there is just to reduce the 
size of the database dump.

2) mysqldump oldserver > mydatabase.sql

3) mysql newserver < mydatabase.sql

4) Copy entire Drupal directory from old server to new server, being careful 
to get the .htaccess file with it.

5) Edit settings.php to specify the new database login info.

6) Enable Clean URLs again.

7) There is no step 7. :-)

(I recommend disabling clean URLs in case there's an issue on the new server.  
You don't want all your links to be broken.)

Really, Drupal is an extremely portable system.  I do the above process to 
move from development servers to live servers on a regular basis.  98% of the 
time is spent waiting for files to copy. :-)

On Friday 19 October 2007, Roy Smith wrote:
> As an old-time unix hacker, I know my way around the inside of a web
> server pretty well, but right now I'm in "I want a tool not a hobby"
> mode and need to find a web hosting service for a club I belong to.
> There seem to be plenty of places out there offering amazing amounts
> disk/bandwidth/etc for amazingly low prices, and it's not clear how
> to determine which are fly-by-night and which are reliable.
>
> So, the question is, if I go with a hosting service and later decide
> to switch to a different provider, how hard is it to pick up my
> drupal-based site and move it to another host?  Is it as simple as
> finding another place that offers LAMP services, dumping the
> database, and restoring it onto the new server?  And, of course,
> changing the DNS registration.
>
> --
> roy at panix.com


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Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
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