Question

Cloned Staging Site to New Droplet and Now it Won't Load - Why?

I had a Wordpress staging site set up and it was working perfectly. I took a snapshot and pushed it to a new Wordpress 18.04 droplet with the same exact configuration as the staging site. I SSH’d in to complete the WP install on the new droplet, but it won’t load the site. I just get a PHP page with tons of text on it. Anyone know what’s up? I have nameservers (3) pointed to DO. I created an A record to point to the IP of the new droplet. I’m not sure what gives. I’ve been at this for hours.

Staging: staging.explorecarbon.com

Production: 104.248.125.9 (explorecarbon.com)

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Nick Wade • December 21, 2018

then pushed that snapshot to a new WP 18.04 droplet.

With simple Droplets, all you need to do with a snapshot is Create Droplet from it. You can do the same with Wordpress but a few configs need to be updated after the restore onto a new IP / host / url. To clarify, theres’ no need to create a WP 18.04 and then restore, the snapshot is a full restore. Assuming that’s what you meant, then the config to be updated for Wordpress moving to a new IP address and new host is found in the wordpress db in the wp_options table. Those must be updated.

Following this article I’ve done that to one Wordpress Droplet recently, using these steps; https://stackoverflow.com/questions/535534/wordpress-host-ip-changed

–Get the root mysql password

more /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf .digitalocean_password

–Connect to the database

mysql -u root -p 
<enter the password from above>

change to the wordpress db

use wordpress

–Check the wp_options for site_url and home

mysql> Select * from wp_options where option_name IN('siteurl','home');

–Update those to my new values

update wp_options set option_value='http://example.com' where option_name = 'siteurl';
update wp_options set option_value='http://example.com' where option_name = 'home';

–Restart the Droplet, wait a few minutes for it to come up, and the site should be up and running on your new host.

Good luck!

Nick Wade • December 21, 2018

Hey, I don’t see PHPspew on your prod IP or the domain root url, I see a basic Wordpress site. Is that new since posting above?

I’m wondering what WP tool you’re using to snapshot your staging site. What about a Droplet snapshot of your staging, restored onto a larger production Droplet, could that work for your intended workflow?