Cloning blog to localhost via WAMP

Question

How do restore a Wordpress blog (actually, cloning would be the right word) from my server to localhost with WAMP?

I backed up my blog with BackUpWordPress and got a .zip file sitename.backup.2012-01-29-12-50-08. As per instructions, I unzipped the file and got a complete Wordpress installation (folders wp-admin, wp-content, a bunch of files, .htaccess etc.) and an SQL database named database_myusername_wrdp2.

I copied all the files except the database to WAMP's www folder.

Then I opened phpMyAdmin through WAMP, created a database named wordpress, opened that database and used Import button to import database_myusername_wrdp2 to this new database.

Unfortunately, there is obviously no connection between the installation and a database as I get Error establishing a database connection message when I try to open localhost.

What am I doing wrong? How do I clone this blog locally?

Answer 1

You must change the parameters to connect to the database in the file wp-config.php in the root folder of your Wordpress installation, or create the same user/password and database name for the database that you have created locally with WAMP.

Note: You may have to change the blog_url and every url in the dump that refers to images/css in the posts , if you want to use it locally. You can do this via a find/replace in the SQL ( http://www.youronlinesite.com -> http://localhost) or in the SQL after you create the DB, see this link for a list of useful queries