Create a Development Drupal Environment

Posted by:

Post date:

December 8, 2011

Topics:

Drupal 5.x, Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x, Drupal

These instructions describe how to set up a development copy of your live Drupal site within the Stanford web environment.

Create a new database (at https://tools.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/sumysql/sumysql). This will give you a database user name and password, stored in a file at /afs/ir/group/mygroup/db_private/db_info
SSH into corn
```
ssh sunetid@corn.stanford.edu
```
Enter your password when prompted
Change into the production Drupal directory
```
cd /afs/ir/group/mygroup/cgi-bin/drupal
```
Create a dump file of the database
```
drush sql-dump --result-file=dbdump.sql
```
Move up one directory
```
cd ..
```
Make a copy of the production directory
```
cp -r drupal drupal-dev
```
Move into the development directory
```
cd drupal-dev
```
Edit the .htaccess file; you want to change the line that starts with "RewriteBase" so that it reflects the new development directory
```
RewriteBase /group/mygroup/cgi-bin/drupal-dev
```

Edit the settings.php file (usually in sites/default) to point to your new, development database
Drupal 6

  $db_url = 'mysqli://newusername:newpassword@127.0.0.1/newdatabasename';

Drupal 7

$databases = array (
  'default' =>  
  array (
    'default' =>  
    array (
      'database' => 'newdatabasename',
      'username' => 'newusername',
      'password' => 'newpassword',
      'host' => '127.0.0.1',
      'port' => '', 
      'driver' => 'mysql',
      'prefix' => '', 
    ),  
  ),  
);

(If applicable) Comment out the line that starts with $base_url in sites/default/settings.php:
```
// $base_url = 'https://myvanityurl.stanford.edu'; // NO trailing slash!
```

Populate the new database from your database dump file

mysql -f -u username -ppassword -h 127.0.0.1 databasename < dbdump.sql

(If applicable) Disable the Reverse Proxy module
```
drush -y dis reverse_proxy
```
Visit your site at http://www.stanford.edu/group/mygroup/cgi-bin/drupal-dev. (Note: the WebAuth Module for Drupal (WMD) may not work on the development site.)
Remember to delete your database dumps (dbdump.sql) from the Drupal directory in both the production and development Drupal installs. These should not be web-accessible.

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Create a Development Drupal Environment