Suggestion for setting up a TEST/QA environment copy of PROD

[bodin]

Hi all,

Do not know in which forum I should put this question, so I apology if it should not be in here.

I would appreciate if someone could provide me a good tutorial or step-by-step guide/checklist for setting up a “mirrored” TEST/QA environment of a PRODUCTION environment. I want to be able to do tests before upgrading to v3.0 on the PRODUCTION domain/server.

Also, anyone who has a link to a great tutorial (step-by-step) for making a backup of “everything” in case of a need of disaster recovery?

I find The Event Calendar PRO phenomenal and I am looking much forward to upgrade to v3.0!

Sincerely,
Andreas

[Barry]

That is definitely a solid idea and something we wholeheartedly recommend.

As a general guideline, you should seek to:

• Make sure the hosting environment is the same as the target environment. For instance, if your production site will run on a dedicated box with Nginx, Ubuntu and PHP 5.5 your development environment ought to mirror that (rather than, to take something of an extreme, being within a shared hosting environment using CentOS, Apache and PHP 5.2).
• Take care of the details – something as simple but easy to miss as a PHP extension (such as CURL or DOM) not being enabled on one or other environments could lead to a hard-to-detect difference between the two installations.
• The same plugins and themes (identical versions) as are going to be used in production should also be used in development should be present in both cases. Indeed so should the version of WordPress be identical.
• You might also consider using a version/revision control system such as Git or SVN. This can let you track changes – and roll back in case of disaster – and also makes it easy to duplicate the same stack of plugins/themes to both environments, once you are at that point. Typically though this will not encompass changes in the database.
• In terms of backing up, there are lots of good tools and plugins that can help with this – search around and see what you feel comfortable with. If you have command line access to your server something like mysqldump can be fast and effective – but isn’t necessarily for everyone.

With the above said, I’ll leave the floor open for others to chip in with further advice 🙂

[Jonah]

Hi Andreas,

What you’re asking for is something we probably won’t provide in depth here because it’s covered so many other places. I would suggest searching around a bit. My personal suggestion would be to use http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-migrate-db/

Here are the steps you need to take to migrate a site with WP Migrate DB:

1. Create a new directory on a server somewhere and move a copy of all the files for your site (the entire WordPress site directory).

2. Install and activate WP Migrate DB. Go to Tools > WP Migrate DB and punch in the details for the new server/folder paths. In most cases you should just be able to copy what’s already there and just append the folder name for the new folder on your server. Then run the migration process which will provide you with a copy of your DB with all the paths rewritten to the new server/folder location.

3. Create a new DB through your web hosting control panel. Import the DB file you downloaded from the WP Migrate DB step.

4. Update your wp-config.php file to point to the new DB.

That’s it! Now you should have a fully working clone of your website that you can test things with 🙂

I hope that helps but let me know if you have any questions.

– Jonah

[bodin]

Thank you very much both of you for providing this great information of what I need to consider. I think I’ll have to do a great “change plan” before proceeding. 🙂
Will check out the suggested tools and the WordPress guide.

Would I have to buy yet another license if I have a TEST/QA database?

Thanks again guys!

//Andreas

[Leah]

Hi Andreas,

You do not need to buy another license for a dev site. We’ve got a little mini tutorial about how to use one key for both sites here. If you have any questions, feel free to post another thread and we can help out.

Cheers,
Leah

[bodin]

Hi all,

Now I’ve tried to do the following.
I bought something called MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and installed it on my MacBook Pro.
I tried the WP migrate DB as Jonah West suggested and it works to some extent. The export works great and the import works great as well.
I can access to website at http://localhost/events and it displays the layout perfect.

Where it does not work, is when I click the link to the EVENT CALENDAR, which in URL fashion is http://localhost/events/events.
Now I just get the error message the requested URL was not found on this server.

For the record. I can login to the admin panel of WordPress.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Thank you in advance!

Sincerely,
Andreas

[bodin]

PROBLEM SOLVED!!

I had forgotten to download the hidden files, like .htaccess.

Now it works!

Looking forward to test the version 3 now! 🙂

[Barry]

Excellent. Sometimes due to local file permissions WordPress is unable to create .htaccess (which it will try to do on your behalf) and so creating it manually or changing the file permissions can help on that front.

Sounds like you’re basically all good to go here – so I will mark this thread as closed.

If there is anything else please don’t hesitate to create a new thread and one of the team will be happy to help 🙂

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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