By huijing on

I have a site running on drupal 6.14 which I developed on my local machine using wampserver. This site essentially is a replacement for an existing site running on my web server (implying my domain already has a site running in it). I would like to replace the existing site with this drupal powered one.
The instructions I gleaned from forums and google essentially tell me to:
1) Copy all my drupal files onto the web server via FTP
2) Export the database on my local machine then import it onto my web server
3) Change the settings.php file

However, my site also has a number of subdomains. Will the standard procedure work for my subdomains to run properly as well? The subdomains have already been created on my webserver but they are currently "empty".
Also, is it possible for the index.html file to remain visible to the public while I'm in the process of moving the localhost site onto the web serve? As I would like to have the default page showing either a maintenance page or something while this upgrading process is going on.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Poieo’s picture

Poieo commented

I would recommend using a subfolder (not a subdomain) to copy your files to. This way, you can get the new site up and running without effecting what is already there. You'll just need to change the base url in your settings.php file to yoursitename.com/subfolder.

Your subdomains won't be affected. Just make sure you don't move/delete the folders when your copying/moving the drupal files.

Once your confident the site is installed correctly on your server, just delete the current site files out of the root folder, copy your drupal files to root, and update the base url in your settings.php file.

huijing’s picture

huijing commented

i'm testing the site in a subfolder and the main site works perfectly on www.domain.com/Drupal...but my subdomains are not recognised, i.e. typing sub.domain.com/Drupal just redirects me back to my main site.
is this because drupal is in a subfolder and the problem will resolve itself once I copy it into the root of my webserver?

Poieo’s picture

Poieo commented

I don't think that is going to work. Your webserver is looking for your subdomains off the root directeory (sub.domain.com). By typing in sub.domain.com/drupal, your actually requesting files located here: www.domain.com/sub/drupal, when you really want the files located here: www.domain.com/drupal/sub. If your subs are in the root of your server, all should be well once you switch to the new site.

Sunshiney’s picture

Sunshiney commented

I saved the following post from cog.rusty in my dev server notebook; it might be helpful to you, so sharing. I am getting ready tomorrow to do the same thing, but to an orgs privately owner server that they have given me admin rights and remote access to. Like you, I have concerns. Hope we can help each other! 

The basic drill is:

- Disable Clean URLs, switch to a default theme, clear all your cache tables, your sessions table, your search index tables, your watchdog logs table (for size -- that one can get huge), and take a database dump.

- Upload all drupal files to where they are going to be accessed.

- Create a drupal database and a drupal database user on your server (command line or using your cpanel). Give to the user all permissions mentioned in Drupal's INSTALL.txt and INSTALL.mysql.txt. Also: visit your empty database with phpmyadmin, go to "Operations" and make sure to set the database to collation utf8_general_ci

- Import your database.

- Update your settings.php file with the correct $db_url and $base_url (if any).

That should be all.

You may encounter some problems which have to do with php versions, mysql versions, problems with file links because of differences in Drupal's base path, but those are best addressed as they arise.
huijing’s picture

huijing commented

just a small qns, if I disable clean urls, my existing pages which do have clean urls won't be affected, right?