How do I copy a one-click WordPress install to run a second site on the same Droplet?

Posted on February 28, 2019

Can anyone point me to instructions on how to copy/clone a one-click WordPress install to another folder so I can run a second site on my Droplet? The one-click install includes some security settings and plugins enabled by default, and I hope to avoid doing the second WordPress installation manually.

I’ve found a tutorial on how to modify a VirtualHosts file to allow multiple domains/sites to be hosted on a single Droplet so can do that part.

Thanks!

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jarland

March 4, 2019

Hey friend,

Let’s say domain1.com is a Wordpress at /var/www/html and you want domain2.com to host a copy of the same installation. Let’s also say these values are true for domain1.com’s Wordpress instance, all of which can be found in wp-config.php:

Database name: wordpress
Database user: wordpress
Database pass: 12345

Here’s what I’d do:

mkdir /var/www/domain2
cp -R /var/www/html/* /var/www/domain2

mysql
create database domain2;
grant all on domain2.* to domain2 identified by '54321';
quit

mysqldump wordpress > /root/wordpress.sql
mysql domain2 < /root/wordpress.sql
chown -R www-data. /var/www/domain2

In this example I set these values for you to change in /var/www/domain2/wp-config.php:

Database name: domain2
Database user: domain2
Database pass: 54321

Obviously use better passwords than I did in this example. Next you have to change domain1.com to domain2.com in the Wordpress configuration, and you can find a few different ways to do that here:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL

You already mentioned that you have no problem configuring the virtual hosts, but just a quick reference for anyone else reading later:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-16-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-nginx-server-blocks-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-16-04

Hope that helps :)

Jarland