I’ve gone into Proxmox and cloned a WordPress machine to a new machine. I configured DNS and DHCP to assign a new host name for the machine; now I need to get WordPress to understand that too.
Because WordPress stores the site URL inside the database, this means running a MySQL query.
The problem is that the old WordPress site (because that is what is in the new machine’s database) keeps telling Apache to serve up the pages from the old machine. So everything on the new machine will need to resolve at https://tratest.example.com but because WordPress is going to its database to find out where everything is, as soon as the page loads, it tries to go to https://aawp.example.com
That machine is powered off in Proxmox, so obviously nothing works.
Can’t really use any tools inside WordPress to do the search-and-replace, so I need something outside of WordPress. I generally do not install phpMyAdmin, because 1) it is extra work to configure Apache to serve up a different website just for this one function, and 2) that becomes just one more place a bored 14 year old might try to break in. If I don’t need it, why put it out there?
So let’s try some MySQL queries from the command line.
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'https://aawp.example.com', 'https://tratest.example.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';
Nice! I did a restart of Apache, and now the new machine at the new domain name serves up the content from the cloned machine. I know that this worked because the old machine in Proxmox is still powered off.
There are also several other changes I made:
- hostnamectl set-hostname tratest.example.com
- edited /etc/hosts and copied the 127.0.1.1 entry to 127.0.2.1 and added the new host name, per Change host name and domain
- edited the Apache .conf file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and replaced the ServerName entry