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phpinstallationenvironmentduplication

How to duplicate a PHP-based website?

Background:

I'm new to PHP, but I've been asked to make some code changes to support an application hosted on our Intranet. The actual code changes don't look too bad. However, there is currently no development environment, so I have undertaken to create a duplicate server to develop and test my changes.

At this point, and not being well-versed in PHP, it looks like I may have to reverse engineer all the Apache HTTPD and PHP configuration settings/options/packages on the production machine unless I can strategically copy the existing production environment to the development machine.

My questions:

  1. Is it possible to do that? i.e. to FTP certain directories in the Apache/PHP installation over to replicate the original environment? If so, which directories? One complication may be that the original environment is SUSE Linux and the development machine is CentOS. Other than that, I have installed the matching HTTPD and PHP versions on the dev machine.
  2. If this isn't wise/possible, how should I go about duplicating the environment? What areas should I check?

Thanks in advance!

Solution

  • An alternative to the already mentioned solutions would be to setup a virtual host on the production machine, something like test.yourdomain.com and copy the database to a test database.

    Then you could test your site on the live server in a test environment and you would only have to change your db connection settings in the test version.