Skip to main content

Tips on moving a site, Part I

Been doing a lot of work lately moving sites from an old dedicated server to a new one with a new hosting company. The old server had no (useful) control panel, so I've been doing a lot of it by hand, and I thought I'd post a few handy pointers for anyone who may be in a similar situation.

For static sites, the process is dead simple - just tar up the old site's content using something like tar -cf [tar filename].tar [path to site]/* will do it. Then depending on the site, it may save you a little time to zip the tarball. Then, after doing whatever you need to do to create a new site on the new server's control panel, login in with SSH, go to the appropriate directory and pull over the tarball with scp:

scp [username]@[server]:[path to tarball]/[tar file] ./

And then extract it, and you're ready to go.

One thing it watch out for is absolute paths in the content from the old site. If you know what they look like, it's pretty easy to grep for that pattern in the files via grep -rl [old path] * which will print out a list of every file (recursively) that has that pattern. You can even open the file list with vim.

Moving mail is a bit of a pain - especially if as in my case you're going from a system that uses mbox format to one that uses Maildir. Thankfully there's a handy free perl script you can use to convert from mbox to Maildir. I found that logging in as the user whose email I wished to transfer, then just running the script using the "-s" switch to point it at the old mail dir worked pretty well. It'll create a new Maildir with all the files. One thing that can be a bit of a pain - if the user has any custom folders, they'll be created with a "." (period) at the beginning of their names, which makes them "invisible" in linux. Which means some things like using scp -r will miss them, and you'll need to specify the directly. Same thing for chown. And on my old server, email in the user's inbox was held elsewhere, which meant I had to use the script a 2nd time to convert that email.

That's it for now, I'll post more later on the more complex types of site migrations - those involved dynamic sites like blogs and forums.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another VI tip - using macros, an example

God I love VI. Well, actually, vim but whatever. Here's another reason why. Suppose you need to perform some repetitive task over and over, such as updating the copyright date in the footer of a static website. (Yes, yes I know you could do a javascript thing or whatever, just bear with me.) Of course you could just search and replace in some text editor, changing "2007" to "2008" (if you're stupid) - and you'll end up with a bunch of incorrect dates being changed, most likely. What you need to do is only change that date at the bottom. And suppose that because of the formatting, you can't use the "Copy" part of the string in a search replace - perhaps some of the pages use "©", some spell out "Copyright" etc. This is where vi macros come in handy. A macro in vi is exactly what you expect, it records your actions and allows you to play them back. To start recording, press q followed by a character to use to "stor...
6 comments
Read more

Using FIle FIlters in FileZilla

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc. FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters - located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in...
1 comment
Read more

Great google article

Over on Maximum PC - there were a few things I didn't know you could do with the various Google apps. One is uploading files to google docs - any file. Which ties in well with my previous post about storing passwords - I uploaded a copy of my password safe file to google docs as a backup. Can't hurt, right? Also, I wasn't aware that you could set up forms in google docs that act as surveys, and then store the results in a google docs spreadsheet. This is a little alarming, as a decent amount of my work involves coding up custom surveys similar to this...
1 comment
Read more