Moving Magento site To Another Server

MySQL Dump.

backup all files (make sure to archive on a .zip file).

Now you need to create a blank database and import the MySQL dump file to it.
Note: load the SQL dump into Editplus or something similar and search and replace the URLs before importing for example: “http://www.domain.com/test/” replace with “http://www.test.com/”.

Edit the local.xml (app/etc/local.xml) file and update the database variables if they’ve changed (but keep the same security/encryption key).

Lastly, in order to make magento connect to work correctly edit the pear.ini (downloader/pearlib/pear.ini) and update al the paths that you see in this file. Otherwise magentoconnect will try to upgrade your old site when you use it.

(the files downloader/pearlib/pear downloader/pearlib/peardev downloader/pearlib/pecl may also need the paths updating if you have changed the path)

(Note: Updating this file -pear.ini- is a tedious job, because when you change the paths, you also need the update the field before it which starts with “s:”. You need to type in the length of characters of the path field that you have updated.)

Make sure there is nothing in the cache directory (var/cache and var/session).

Finally make sure the permissions are still correct on the new server.
If you find any errors, make sure folder permissions are set to 755 and file permissions to 644. If your administration submenu pulldowns don’t work, make sure /js/index.php is 644.

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Magento ver: 1.3.2.4

That’s it, you’re all done!