Moving Magento To A New Server

March 3

Magento requires a lot from both your server and you. Upgrad­ing to another host­ing account or just mov­ing Magento to a new loca­tion could be a time-consuming task and there are a few things you should be aware of. Hav­ing some infor­ma­tion at hand could reduce poten­tial down­time and make the process quicker and more painless.

Mov­ing the folders

If you don’t want to move the entire Magento folder to its cozy new home, make sure to move the media, app/etc and your theme fold­ers. Remem­ber, there is both a skin folder and a design folder for your theme and you most def­i­nitely need them both.

MySQL data­base dump

Make a data­base dump of the old data­base and import it to the new loca­tion. In the core_config_data table, change the val­ues of web/secure/base_url and web/unsecure/base_url to reflect any changes in the domain. If you’re mov­ing Magento into a sub­di­rec­tory, also change the Rewrite­Base in the root folder .htac­cess file.

The set­tings in your app/etc/local.xml file should be changed to let Magento con­nect to your new database.

Updat­ing the paths

Clear the var/cache folder when mov­ing the site to make sure no cache is left from the old one. Remove or rename the downloader/pearlib/pear.ini file to make sure the Magento Con­nect down­loader upgrades the path it uses. For­get this and you’ll be scratch­ing your head the next time you’re installing an extension.

The right permissions

Sim­ply make the app/etc, var and media fold­ers write­able by the server.

Updat­ing Magento

Why not update Magento to the lat­est ver­sion while you are still pok­ing around? You can use the Magento Con­nect down­loader or if you pre­fer (or can’t access the site via a browser yet) you can run the fol­low­ing com­mands on your server:

./pear mage-setup .
./pear install magento-core/Mage_All_Latest

That should also do any required updates on the data­base. If you ever import a Magento 1.3 data­base to a Magento 1.4 instal­la­tion, run the com­mands again to make sure the struc­ture is correct.

Poten­tial prob­lem: Some images are not showing

You have trans­ferred all the images to the new loca­tion and cleared the cache but only some of them show up when brows­ing the cat­a­log on the front-end. This can occur when Magento can’t allo­cate enough RAM when load­ing the images. Increase the memory_limit in php.ini and restart the Apache service.

Poten­tial prob­lem: Prod­ucts are missing

If some prod­ucts are miss­ing or the site seems dif­fer­ent from the old one, rein­dex the catalog.

Poten­tial prob­lem: Prices always dis­play exclud­ing taxes

This can occur when upgrad­ing to Magento 1.4. You’ve set the con­fig­u­ra­tion to include taxes in all the prices but they still dis­play with­out taxes on the front-end. What you need to do is to set the Ori­gin on the Ship­ping Options page in the site configuration.

More resources

What I’ve men­tioned here is only the bare basics of mov­ing Magento to a new server. Once you hit a prob­lem, that’s when things become a lot more inter­est­ing. While Google is your best friend, below is a list of a few of the resources I’ve per­son­ally found helpful.

Mov­ing Magento To Another Server
I Actu­ally Am Get­ting Orders Now on 1.4
Magento 1.4 Install Errors
Mov­ing Magento […] (poten­tial prob­lems)
Issues With Mov­ing Magento
Mov­ing Magento Site From Devel­op­ment To Live

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4 responses to “Moving Magento To A New Server”

  1. Dave
    Dave
    May 12 at 1:02 PM |

    Great resource Daniel, thanks so much for post­ing! I’m look­ing to switch hosts, and this will def­i­nitely come in handy!

  2. Daniel Nordstrom
    Daniel Nordstrom
    May 17 at 3:58 AM |

    Thank you for commenting!

    I hope the switch will go well. When I did this for a client, it took us a cou­ple of weeks to get it back to work­ing as smooth as it did before; run­ning faster of course, which was the whole point. This was a pretty big site with a cus­tom theme, I might add.

    It took some time because I also upgraded the shop to 1.4 and it wasn’t very well doc­u­mented at the time. The switch itself was never an issue. Instead, we had some issues with 1.4 theme incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties, server opti­miza­tions and so on. Switch­ing host­ing server is an excel­lent oppor­tu­nity to also upgrade the site and it was worth the time.

    Now it’s run­ning very smoothly!

  3. Binod Kumar Luitel
    Binod Kumar Luitel
    June 27 at 9:04 PM |

    Thanx Mate,
    You solved my prob­lem, I never knew, I also need to remove pear.ini. That was why I was unable to install any new exten­sions at my pro­duc­tion server. Thank u very much.

  4. Daniel Nordstrom
    Daniel Nordstrom
    June 28 at 10:12 AM |

    Hey, thanks for your com­ment. Exactly, the pear.ini con­tains some file sys­tem paths that need to be cor­rected before we’re able to install new extensions. :)

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