Suggestion for Moving Magento to new Server With SSH

Question

I'm looking for a way to move an installation from a development server to live server.

Generally I have SSH access however this time I don't.

I know theres allot of information on how to do it. Just want to see which is best.

Answer 1

As many of the comments suggest, this isn't a good sign that your host is going to play nicely with Magento!

Using FTP directly on the several thousand files that make up Magento sucks and is pretty unreliable, so...

If you really can't wrangle SSH out of them and you can't changes hosts then this is what I'd do:

• On the development machine export a gzipped mysql dump of the database.

• In Cpanel create a database and user, then go into phpMyAdmin and import your dump file into it (if the file is too large to import you'll just have to ask your host to manually import the db for you, you could split it up into different tables if you had to, but I bet you can raise a support ticket with them for a db import).

• Back on your development machine empty out the var/cache, var/log, var/session folders and then compress the entire site into an archive file. If you have heaps of images and want to get the file size down you can also empty out the image cache in media/catalog/product/cache and just let the server rebuild them as required.

• FTP that up to somewhere you control in your cpanel home directory (not the public_html folder).

• With Cpanel's filemanager you can use it's unzip function to extract the entire thing into the public_html folder.

• Finally push up via FTP the correct version of local.xml for the production database.

If you've been using a different base_url for your local development environment you'll also need to correct that in the core_config table via phpMyadmin.