Piotr Zalewa

Recently I faced the problem of moving one of our drupal sites to a new environment. I had several problems, which probably are quite common. Here it is what one have to do – step by step.

My settings are (Drupal 4):

Old server: Apache 1.3, PHP 4.4.4, MySQL 4.1

New server: Apache 2.0, PHP 5.2.2, MySQL 5.0.40

1. Make a backup of the site (database and files)

Do full MySQL dump (preferable with DROP commands). It's easy to do with stuff like PHPMyAdmin. With a mysqldump command just do:

mysqldump -u db_user -p databasename --add-drop-table > filename.sql

Copy the filestructure to the tar.gz file. Use FTP client or:

wget -r ftp://user:password@ftp.server/
tar cfvz ftp.server.tar.gz ftp.server

2. Install on the system

One may copy the SQL files first to the server – always depends on local/server configuration.

If needed convert the SQL file encoding to UTF:

iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 ~/database.sql > ~/database.utf.sql

and change standard encoding

vi database.utf.sql

:%s/TYPE=MyISAM/TYPE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8/g

Install remotely using PHPMyAdmin or copy it to the server (I prefer secure shell) and inject it into the system.

Copying (on local machine)

scp database.sql user@webserver:

Injection (on the server):

mysql -u db_root -p database < database.utf.sql

Set access to the database

mysql -u db_root -p database

GRANT all on database.* to db_user@localhost identified by 'password'

Copy the filestructure – use your preffered method…

scp ftp.server.tar.gz user@webserver:
cd /var/www/vhosts
tar xfvz ~/ftp.server.tar.gz

Give apache write access to some directories

sudo chown -R apache:apache files

edit sites/default/set­tings.php if needed (i.e. different db_user)

3. Fix environment differencies

(After drupal bugtrack ) Add session_write­_close() on the end of index.php to solve the problem with not saving session data.

I found also a weird thing. On the old server the RewriteCond

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

didn't catch the something.html if the address was /something, on the new site it was doing it. I simply move these rubbish into the other folder and everything worked fine.