Change site url when moving site to another url?

Question

Is it really neccessary to put WP_HOME, WP_SITEURL in wp-config.php or set these settings via admin panel every time when moving a WordPress instance to another url (for example: moving from dev environment to production)? Is there any better strategy?

Answer 1

What I do here is I keep an entry in my /etc/hosts file pointing the site domain to 127.0.0.1. Most of the time the line is commented so my machine points to the production site, and when I'm developing something I just uncomment the line and the domain will point to my dev box.

I know it's kinda ugly, but since Wordpress puts the domain in a lot of fields in the database (especially if you need to work with real data in your development environment), it's the fastest method I could come up with.

Answer 2

When you move from one server to another the problem could be URLs that WP serialized in DB. To do a safe search and replace you can use this tool search replace db.

Is very simple, follow the instructions and remember to remove the script when done.

Answer 3

You could put those settings in an external file and exclude it from your publishing process.

Answer 4

Those parameters and admin settings change the URLs in the database. The only other way to do that is run SQL queries on the DB in phpmyadmin to change them:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://olddomain.com', 'http://newdomain.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://olddomain.com','http://newdomain.com');

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://olddomain.com', 'http://newdomain.com');

UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value, 'http://olddomain.com', 'http://newdomain.com');

Answer 5

I don't mess with core files, I just move the themes and plugins around instead. I develop locally and zip the themes and plugins for production. I have about ten WordPress installs most internal and this has worked well for me so far.

I also, don't move much data around so this answer may not help you. There are some pretty extensive free plugins for backing up data and restoring.

Answer 6

Use on the top of your functions.php: update_option('siteurl','http://yoursite.com'); update_option('home','http://yoursite.com');

Navgigate through your site a bit, login the backend en remove these lines.

This should be sufficient.