Migrating a Drupal 6 site
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Migrating a Drupal 6 site

Posted 10/08/2010 - 12:20 by State68

Migrating a Drupal site from one development platform to another can be a real pain. Nicole Bluto wrote a great blog post for the 2009 LA Drupalcamp on how to migrate a Drupal 6 site cleanly:

http://www.drupalcampla.nicolebluto.com/node/3

Here's a distilled, step-through version of that post, tested between two OS X accounts, both running XAMPP:

The export

  1. Download and install http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
  2. Navigate to admin/content/backup_migrate
  3. The default settings should say Backup from Default Database to Manual Backups Directory using Default Settings – check that these are selected in the drop-downs, and hit “Backup now”. Your site’s database will be backed up to sites/all/files/backup_migrate/manual
  4. Take a copy of the sites/ folder – this now contains a backup of your site’s database, too.

The import

  1. Download a fresh D6 install from http://drupal.org/project/drupal
  2. Unpack the D6 install to your localhost, but don’t run through the install process
  3. Overwrite the sites/ folder in your fresh D6 install with the sites/ folder copied in step 4 of the export process, above
  4. Create a new database in phpMyAdmin
  5. Import the database from sites/all/files/backup_migrate/manual
  6. Change $db_url in sites/default/settings.php to point at the newly created database
    Save settings.php, cross your fingers, and boot your site!