January 17, 2008 - 5:46pm
3 comments

Drupal Site Migration, Lots going on!

Hello Everyone,
Much activity is going on at the transforming former jail site. We are in the last mile of hurdles compleing our County conditional use permit. This required raising a sum of money for infastructure, demolition, and asbestos abatement. This really is shaping up to be a "jail to jewel" it is a beatifull, wooded campus . We have a large host of synergistic non-profits lining up to be tenents. We really haved passed critical mass!

We have a small army of volunteers that are much of the driving force.
I have been in charge of protecting our fiber backbone and Cat5e drops since they always seem to get severed in construction and demolition jobs.

Drupal Migration:
Has anyone performed a Drupal migration from one location to another and changed the domain name? Any feedback would be gratly appreciated.
Jim Mora
jimm@helpofojai.org

Comment from Kevin Palmer on January 18, 2008 - 12:36pm

Kevin Palmer's picture

Hey Jim. That's really great there's so many organizations already excited to move in!

I've done a couple Drupal migrations recently (along with Ben who just moved the ctcvista.org site to a new host. Go Ben!). Are you working with PHPMyAdmin in the migration process?

Comment from Ben Sheldon on January 20, 2008 - 5:20pm

Ben Sheldon's picture

Hi Jim,

I actually just moved our ctcvista.org website to a new webhost last weekend. It wasn't too much trouble---though we're lucky since we don't get too much traffic. I would recommend a late Saturday or Sunday night (since that's usually lowest traffic), but the steps are basically:

1) Put Drupal into maintenance mode (in the admin settings you can take the site offline)
2) copy over the files to your new webhost (I use the command line to tar on one server and wget on the other, but you can use ftp too)
3) dump your database (mysqldump or through phpmyadmin) and insert it into the new database
4) update your settings.php for the new database info
5) if you're going to a new domain name, you should be fine (maybe want to update your settings directory name in /sites). Otherwise you'll want to update the DNS for the domain name.

But it's not too much trouble. Email me or call me (http://ctcvista.org/contact) if I can help explain things better.

Happy Drupal-ing!

Comment from Morgan Sully on January 22, 2008 - 4:27pm

Morgan Sully's picture

Jim,
I have done this before, but without the use of modules.

  1. Put Drupal into maintenance mode (in the admin settings you can take the site offline). Be sure to disable all custom modules from the admin/build menu
  2. Back up the Drupal database. This can be done through PHPMyAdmin. There are also some command line ways to do this, but I don’t know how :p
  3. Create an empty database for Drupal on your new site to prepare for the migration. Again, you can do this through PHPMyAdmin. Be sure to take note of the database name, user and password. There are instructions for how to use these methods in the INSTALL.mysql.txt file that comes with Drupal.
  4. Download the entire folder that contains your Drupal install on your ‘development’ site and then upload it’s contents (not the containing folder!) to the root of the new site.
  5. Insert the database from your old site into the new site (again, easily done through PHPMyAdmin).
  6. Edit your settings.php file. This is found in the [sites/default] folder.

That should be about it. Some pretty cool instructions for using PHPMyAdmin in this process can be found on an old Lullabot podcast for Drupal 4.7:

http://www.lullabot.com/videocast/upgrading-to-drupal-4.7

Anyone think I’m missing something?