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WordPress

Jennifer Hinkle
Jennifer Hinkle
8,365 Points
Posted by Jennifer Hinkle
Jennifer Hinkle
8,365 Points

Migrating a site

Hello,

I've been following the How to Build a Wordpress Theme and have been developing my site locally on my computer. After getting pretty far into my project, I wanted to start another and discovered that I could easily host more than one site locally. However, I stupidly named the original website root directory incorrectly. I want to migrate my site to a different folder within the same (in MAMP- I have mac) htdocs folder. However, when I followed the How to Migrate a Local Wordpress Site to a Live Server, I've gotten stuck. I successfully backed up my original site, copied those files into the new folder, edited my wp-config.php file, and created/ imported my database correctly. But when I tried navigating to localhost/newfoldername.com/wp-admin I get a 404 message saying the page can't be found. I feel as if I must have edited my wp-config file incorrectly. I changed the DB_NAME to "newdatabasename" and I think that step must be correct because localhost/newfoldername.com takes me to the site I developed. But when I add /wp-login or /wp-admin I get an error message. Also, when I click the "Home" menu option it takes me to the current live version on the web (http://newfoldername.com). I must have set the URL for the site incorrectly, defining WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL wrong. I put them as: "localhost/newfoldername.com" If this is long winded, I apologize. I'm new to development in general so my technical vocabulary is still pretty basic. (Thank you Treehouse for teaching the basics I now know!). If anyone could give me some advice or direction on what I might be doing wrong, I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks, Jenn

1 Answer

Chris McKnight
Chris McKnight
11,045 Points
Chris McKnight
Chris McKnight
11,045 Points

You should create a vhost for the site. Open the folder /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/extra and open the file named httpd-vhosts.conf. Add a new block at the end of the file similar to this.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Users/username/Sites/newfoldername.com"
    ServerName newfoldername.dev
</VirtualHost>

Also, add an entry to your hosts file. Open /etc/hosts and put a line like the following at the end.

127.0.0.1 newfoldername.dev

You will also have to replace the URLs in your local database. Find the table wp_options and replace siteurl and home with newfoldername.dev.