Moved a Joomla site to another server

I had a staging version of my Joomla 1.0.12 site at home on Linux (Fedora Core 6). Once I was ready to go live to the hosted version, I needed to move the complete site to the live servers and I didn’t want to re-enter all the content.

I found this excellent reference – seems deceptively simple, but it is indeed that simple.

I followed these steps:

Staging

1. Copied the web directory for the staging site to another location.
2. Edited the configuration.php in the copy for the following parameters: $mosConfig_user, $mosConfig_password, $mosConfig_db, $mosConfig_absolute_path, $mosConfig_live_site, $mosConfig_cachepath
   
3. Zipped up the copy files
4. Exported mySQL database for the staging site using phpmyadmin.
   

Live

1. Created a database with the parameters specified in step 2 for Staging.
2. Used phpmyadmin to import the mySQL database contents.
3. Uploaded the zipped files to the site and unzipped them.
   

At this point, the live site was up and running.

PS: It would be naive to assume that everything worked the first time. For example, I had to install phpmyadmin in my staging area and there were issues with new user creation in mySQL. I also performed a site move to another area on the same server to figure out the problems I might encounter when moving to the live servers. Once the annoyances were out of the way, it was a pretty smooth move.