Pushing/Migrating your local Drupal site to a live-site.

Question

• I have installed drupal on my localmachine(ubuntu, Xampp), at localhost.
• Path and Pathauto modules are active (a module to produce friendly URLs).

Migrating/Pushing my local install to the www.mysite.com

• Exported SQL from phpMyadmin(localhost).
• Made a new DB at live site (I think a different name from the localhost-DB does not create any problem).
• Imported SQL into phpMyadmin, (mysite).
• Changed the username-password-DBname in the sites/default/settings.php in drupal folder.
• Now, uploaded the drupal folder and all its content into the /www of the "mysite.com".

Visited the URL www.mysite.com, site looks same as on my localhost, good.

But --

1. I made a tryPage on my localhost/drupal, for which pathauto(cleanURL) recommended the URL "content/trypage" which i explicitly changed to "trypage", so that absolute link to the page is "localhost/drupal/trypage" and not "localhost/drupal/content/trypage".
   Now When i click the trypage link on the mysite, it open's it in-reference to my localhost, my local-pages are opened. That is, when I click newpage on the mysite.com, the URL requested is "localhost/drupal/newpage" and not "www.mysite.com/newpage".

   Do you think it is coz of the SEO friendly URL generation issue, the Pathauto module.

   Anyways how do i solve this
   If I make my "localhost/drupal" to open from same URL (mysite.com), i dont know how to do that exactly, i think by configuring vhosts. But if i do that, then the URL www.mysite.com where will it take me, local or online.

2. Now If i add new modules, new content, new pages, and new books on my localhost site, and wish to update mysite.com, do i have to redo SQL export/import everytime, and use a software like rsync/sitecopy(), to upload the folders on the live site. How do i solve this.

Answer 1

This is an old question, but here are some thoughts.

1. Links generated by Drupal (e.g. menu links, links within the admin area, breadcrumbs, etc.) should always use the domain of the currently requested site. URLs within Drupal are handled by the "router", which stores all paths within the database in a relative format.

   That said, unless you're specifying the site URL in settings.php (the $base_url variable) or are linking to pages using fully qualified URLs, this shouldn't be a problem. Linking to different nodes from other nodes can be handled with a variety of modules. Pathologic is a good choice, or Path Filter.

2. Moving Drupal sites from development to staging to production is still a common problem for which there is no definitive solution. This question was asked previously here.