Error migrating from live website to localhost

Question

I'm trying to move a Wordpress installation in a web hosting to a localhost installation for development. I followed this tutorial (Section Manually Move a Live WordPress Site to Local Server, for now I'm not allowed to install plugins, so I must do it manually).

I'm using MAMP Free edition and followed all the steps in the aforementioned tutorial. But when I tried to open the site in the local installation I got the message (In Safari):

Safari cannot open the page "localhost/sitename" because cannot be connected to server "localhost"

MAMP load sites in localhost:8888/<site-name> so i executed:

UPDATE wp_options 
SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://www.thesite.com', 'http://localhost:8888/localsite') 
WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl'; 

where thesite is the name in the web hosting and localsite is the name of the folder in MAMP/htdocs/ where I moved the site's files.

The only weird thing I noted is that the exported DB from the live site does not have a home option in wp_options. I don't know if it's a required row, but the online site was working without it.

What am I missing here? If I followed the tutorial correctly, it should load the site.

If you need some more info about the problem just let me know. Thanks in advance for your answers.

Answer 1

Changing the home and siteurl in your wp_options table is not enough unfortunately. You will still have your post content with your non-localhost URL (http://www.thesite.com) causing your website to not display properly on your localhost.

You should have the wp_options table on your localhost copy. Everything should be intact. To make sure exported your database from your live site correctly, please follow these quick instructions provided by WordPress.

Once you've downloaded and imported your database to your localhost. Follow these steps:

1. Go and download Interconnect IT's Database Search & Replace Script here
2. Unzip the file and drop the folder in your localhost where your WordPress is installed (the root) and rename the folder to replace (screenshot)
3. Navigate to the new folder you created in your browser (ex: http://localhost:8888/localsite/replace) and you will see the search/replace tool
4. It should be pretty self-explanatory up to this point: enter your old URL in the search for… field and the new URL in the replace with… field

You can click the dry run button under actions to see what it will be replacing before you execute the script. Once you're done be sure to remove the /replace/ folder.

Answer 2

Try This in wp-config.php

define( 'WP_HOME', 'http://example.com' );
define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'http://example.com' );