Setting up a local copy from a production site

Question

I'm having an issue with a local copy of a live WordPress site. The local site itself http://localhost/mywordpress/ works as I did the following:

• copy the production WP folder;
• import the MySQL database to the local db with the same credentials as production (I've already created the local db and username same as production);
• update the home and siteurl to localhost in wp_options;
• update wp_postmeta, setting meta_value to replace http://www.example.com with http://localhost/mywordpress delete the wp-config.php file so that I can set up the configuration manually;

Upon the setup, I am able to view the site's homepage, but accessing http://localhost/mywordpress/wp-login.php produces a 403 error message.

To get around this, I copied the code to a wp-login2.php, and I can see the page without issue. However, upon submit, I get redirected to the production site. Seeing this, I thought that maybe changing the instances of wp-login.php to wp-login2.php would help, but same issue occurs, except that the page is a 404 since it doesn't exist in production.

When clicking on other links on the homepage, I get redirected to the XAMPP dashboard page. This despite the link addressing to http://localhost/mywordpress/somelink/

I apologize for the overload in details.

Added detail, when accessing http://localhost/mywordpress/wp-admin/, I get redirected to the production site.

Answer 1

It is painful to clone the wordpress site sometimes when the site has a lot of plugins and custom code.

I did it manually before. But I am using "Duplicator" plugin to handle this now.

Please check: https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/

Answer 2

For me, it turned out to be a plugins issue. So I ran the following query:

update wp_options set option_value = 'a:0:{}' where option_name = 'active_plugins'