How do I clone my website to another site, like a development site?

The Brownrice Website Cloner!

Its easy to clone a website (including its files, database and all settings) from a live site to a development via the Brownrice Dashboard.  Or you can do the opposite and clone a development website and/or database to your live site when you want to move development changes live.  Or you can clone a site to a totally different site!  

How to clone your website:

Login to https://dashboard.brownrice.com then click:

  • VPS Hosting
  • Manage (Green Button) next to the VPS that hosts the site you'd like to clone
  • Web Sites
  • Finally, click the small copy icon (next to the little wrench icon!)
  • Follow prompts

Notes:

  • Snapshots! We'll create a snaphot of your entire VPS before beginning the cloning process so that if things don't go the way you thought they would you can quickly revert to the pre-cloned status of your VPS.
  • Options! You can clone the site to any valid domain name that you like.  And by default we'll copy the files, database, Wordpress settings, and web server configurations to the new site, but you can choose which of these you'd like to be perfrormed.
  • Wordpress?  Yeah, this works GREAT with Wordpress sites.
  • Yep, it'll overwrite things!  Know that if you are cloning a site to another site that already exists on your VPS that it will overwrite the site files.  This is a feature, not a bug!  And this will allow you to update a development or live site as often as you need. 
  • Its a hammer! Keep in mind that there are no file or database merges going on here.  Its either all or nothing.  So if you clone from a dev site to your live site, and you've asked the script to move the files and the database, then ALL of the files and ALL of the database from the dev site will be moved live.  Nothing will remain from the original live site.  If you want to merge data you'll need to get your SSH and git skills going asap!

And remember, if this doesn't go the way you thought it would, restore the VPS to the snapshot that our dashboard just created for you!

 

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