I’m new to EE and would like to set up a new client but wanted to know if there was a way to set up a development environment. Where I can gain experience with the software before posting any files to a live site and also for the client to work in, and get familiar with the control panel without the fear of messing anything up. Thank you for the help.

Hi, five19 - welcome to the forums.  I have already emailed some suggestions to you, but to clarify further - did you want to set up the local development environment on your personal machine, or on a web host?  If on a web host, then the same server requirements apply, but you’d have to keep the site online or place it behind a password if using a licensed version.

If on a local machine, I’d look up XAMPP for the Windows, or MAMP for OSX as those can give you a quick, easy dev environment to work with.

Thanks for the information, I was looking to set up a test environment with a web host, the hosting environment for the client. Could I set up a subdomain, possibly as test.clientdomain.com, would that work? Then when the site is ready, transfer the site to clientdomain.com?

Thank you again for the help

I can’t see any reason that wouldn’t work, five19. =)

Great! Thanks for your help.

five19 - 14 March 2008 11:02 AM

I was looking to set up a test environment with a web host, the hosting environment for the client. Could I set up a subdomain, possibly as test.clientdomain.com, would that work? Then when the site is ready, transfer the site to clientdomain.com?

I do that all the time, five19. When you get ready to move the site out of the subfolder to the root of the site - just come on back to the forums and we can help you iron out those spots that seem to be sticklers for most when they’re first doing this…namely some path settings.

Nice! Thanks

hi, i’m about to do something similar; i’ve got a test deployment at test.myserver.com and want to move it to www.myserver.com (separate machines).  I can move the system files easily, but what settings stored by EE in the DB do i need to be careful of if i do a mysqldump on test and re-import on live?  there seem to be path settings in a couple places (file upload options, general server settings, even template exporting).

or is there a better way to migrate from one machine to another?

cheers!