Migrate wordpress site manually

After a quick search to look for some information about how to migrate a wordpress site manually I realised that most of the solutions used some plugins. I like to do things in the hard way, so I decided to migrate all data manually and I want to share all the steps I did just in case someone finds them useful.

The goal of this entry is just to detail the steps needed to migrate the wordpress site from one host to another one. I won´t describe how to install wordpress in the new host.

I migrated my wordpress site from a VM running in Hetzner to another VM running in Oracle Cloud (both VMs running the same version of OS).

Requirements

• WordPress is running same version in both VMs
• MySQL is running the same version in both VMs
• PHP is running same version in both VMs
• Apache2 is running same verion in both VMs

Steps in the source VM

• Stop apache2 server

systemctl stop apache2

• Create a backup of the database

mysqldump -u root --database <wordpress_database> -p > wordpress_dump.sql

The above command will ask your for the password of the root user of the MySQL instance. Bear in mind you need to replace <wordpress_database> by the name of the database configured in wordpress.

• Compress the folder where the wordpress site installation is located. In my case, it is /var/www/wordpress

tar cfz wordpress.tar.gz /var/www/wordpress

• Copy wordpress_dump.sql file and wordpress site tar file to the destination VM

scp wordpress_dump.sql <user>@<vm_destination_ip>:
scp wordpress.tar.gz <user>@<vm_destination_ip>:

Bear in mind that <user> and <vm_destination_ip> must be replaced

Steps in the destination VM

• Connect to MySQL instance, create the db, create the wordpress user and grant the required permissions

mysql -u root -p
CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
CREATE USER wordpress@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '<PASSWORD>';
GRANTS ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO wordpress@localhost;

• Import all the data into the database

mysql -u root -p wordpress < wordpress_dump.sql

• Copy the wordpress site files to the desired path

tar xfz wordpress.tar.gz
cp -R wordress /var/www

• Enable the required plugins in apache2

a2enmod ssl
a2enmod rewrite

• Restart apache

systemctl restart apache2

I hope you find useful these steps. Do not hesitate to ask any question in the comments section.

See you in the next post!