WordPress and Copying or Cloning a Website Manually

...OK, you've got the perfect website. No, not the content, the Admin Stuff. All of the plugins, settings and other stuff. And now there's a new website you need for yourself or your client. Build the whole thing from scratch. Nope. Clone it, copy it, etc. There are lots of tools out there to do just that. Some are good, some are terrible. If none of them work and you need to do it manually, here's how.

This article is for experts. There's no step by step with pictures. Sorry. It also assumes the use of Apache on CentOS. But it also applies to other web servers like NGinx and other Linux flavors too.

The Steps

• Copy the source sites Directory (and all the files) to a new Directory. If using a Linux based web server, this is the safest way to copy things in that it preserves any symbolic links, etc: cp -ax WhatEverSourceDirectory WhatEverDestinationDirectory
• Set all the Directory and File permissions so the web server is happy and everything works;
  • chown -R apache:apache DirectoryName
  • find FolderName -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
  • find FolderName -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
• Export the database using the command line or phpMyAdmin (various methods and details here)