Moving my Vanilla Forum to new hosting

xifekobo

Hi,

I'm thinking of switching hosting so I was wondering what are the complete steps to transfer my full data to another vanilla forum/new hosting, including plugins and forum settings.

whu606

@xifekobo

Basic:

You will need a copy of all the files in your Vanilla folder, and a copy of your database. How you get this will depend on your current host.

Once you have uploaded them to your new host, delete the ini files in the cache folder and you should be good.

Belt and braces

Set up an account at your new host.

Make a clean install of Vanilla, and check that it is working as expected.

Copy your live database to your new host, change config.php to reflect the live database name and password, and delete the ini files in cache.

Copy over any custom theme(s) you have. Enable theme if applicable.

Check everything is working.

Copy over your plugins folder from your live site, and enable the plugins you use.

Check everything is working.

Personally, I went the belt and braces route when I switched host.

It's much less stressful to troubleshoot issues on a test site.

xifekobo

Thank you @whu606, I'll try this out!

River

@xifekobo

Basic:

You will need a copy of all the files in your Vanilla folder, and a copy of your database. How you get this will depend on your current host.

Once you have uploaded them to your new host, delete the ini files in the cache folder and you should be good.

Belt and braces

Set up an account at your new host.

Make a clean install of Vanilla, and check that it is working as expected.

Copy your live database to your new host, change config.php to reflect the live database name and password, and delete the ini files in cache.

Copy over any custom theme(s) you have. Enable theme if applicable.

if you want uploaded images and user uploaded-files to work.

Copy your /uploads folder from the old forum to the new server.
make sure the permissions and ownership on the uploads folder and subfolders of the upload folder are correct.
test adding a user pic and an editor file upload.

Check everything is working.

Copy over your plugins folder from your live site, and enable the plugins you use.

upload the latest version of plugins.

Check everything is working.

Personally, I went the belt and braces route when I switched host.

It's much less stressful to troubleshoot issues on a test site.

you are in an ideal situation to test and install 2.3b1 on your new server if you want to test it.

https://vanillaforums.org/discussion/32168/vanilla-2-3-beta

you also might want to run phpinfo() on your old server and take a snapshot of the "environment" and settings and compare to the new server. Modules, versions, ini settings etc. It could help you in troublshooting issues.

xifekobo

Thanks River! I will try and do a test transfer with these info.