Magento migration to local environment

Question

I'm trying to duplicate my live Magento install by bringing everything over to my local environment to get SVN going (as answered in related questions, thank you very much to all that contributed).

Here's the steps I followed:

1. Backup the site through cPanel and downloaded to local
2. Untarred the homedirectory and brought into htdocs
3. Imported the database SQL from the backup to a DB with same name
4. Changed base URLs for all sites in the database
5. Changed local.xml to reflect the new user/pw because of MAMP

Now, when I open the directory, nothing is loading - no errors or anything. I checked permissions and made sure my other directories were functioning, which they were. This is a 1.3 install, and I attempted to upgrade to 1.4 but ran into a ton of problems - that will have to be a future endeavor. Any ideas?

Answer 1

If .htaccess isn't the issue, can you check file permissions? Also try accessing a URL that doesn't exist at all. If you get a redirect or 404 error, that means that your blank page is probably in fact an error. Make sure that display_errors is turned on in your php.ini and in index.php (uncomment #ini_set('display_errors', 1);) and try again.

Answer 2

I enabled errors per JM's answer and got an invalid T_String PHP error on index.php. __tostring() is not supported in PHP 5.3, which is the default option for MAMP. I would need to make some edits to the core files to get it functioning. Switching to PHP 5.2 fixed the issue, and the site is working correctly now.

Answer 3

Did you delete all the content under the /var/ Directory - last time I did a move like this that was the actual problem. Then make sure you go to index management and index all the catalog.