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Accepted
Branko
Asked: 2010-01-16 22:39:44 +0800 CST

Test WordPress on local Windows 2008 - production on hosted Linux

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I have my WordPress based website hosted on a Linux server. I plan to redesign the site and would like to do in on a local test server first. I am an experienced Windows administrator, but have a very limited Linux knowledge. I would like to have my test server installed on a local Windows machine.

What steps should I make to create a copy of my production WordPress environment on a local Windows 2008 server?

Thanks!

windows linux testing wordpress

3 Answers

  1. Personally, I'd ask my hosting company for a staging environment that mirrors production. That way you don't have to deal with any administration yourself, you won't have to worry about differences between a local Windows environment and the production Linux environment causing issues, and it should be cheap because there's little resource usage.

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  2. I use VirtualBox and a copy of whatever distribution of Linux is used by the hosting service.

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  3. Best Answer

    Your easiest solution is to install xampp. That will give you PHP, MySQL and Apache HTTP server, and it's very easy to configure for a dev environment.

    Be cautious with the Unix vs Windows file naming conventions.

    Linux is case sensitive, and it expects forward slashes instead of backslashes. Spaces in file names are discouraged.

    For bonus points, edit your hosts file so that your domain name points to your local dev machine's IP address.

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