I’m going to show you how easy it is to migrate WordPress using only the command line. It is just as simple as installing it, in the first place. If you followed the tutorial on deploying wordpress from terminal successfully, you’ll have no trouble with this one.

Migrate WordPress from the Terminal

To be honest, unless you’re using the kick ass wp-cli tool. I’ve found that it’s easiest, and fastest, to use the command line to migrate WordPress. There’s no fiddling about with random plugins that’ll clutter up your database and bother you otherwise. And, in the end, it’s really only a few commands.

All we need to do is make sure we have all of the files and the file structure intact, as well as the database. If you’re moving from one domain name to another, you may need to find and replace in the database, everywhere your origin domain exists with your destination domain. Or, you could just update the website’s settings with your destination domain prior to performing the migration.

We’ll touch on fixing the configuration, if you forgot to update your domain before the migration, at the end.

Zip and Grab the WordPress Files

Go ahead and SSH into the machine hosting WordPress that you plan to migrate and zip up the entirety of the wordpress directory.

ssh <source host>
cd /var/www/html
sudo zip -r wordpress-migration.zip *
sudo mv wordpress-migration ~

You’ll see a lot of spam fly by as zip recursively compresses all of the files in preparation for our WordPress migration. Finally, I move the zip archive back to my user directory, where all that’s left for that part is to change the ownership to my user and pull it down. But, we still need the database or we won’t have anything for users or content or anything that matters.

Saving the WordPress Database for Migration

sudo mysql_dump -u wp_db_user -p wp_database > wordpress-database-backup.sql
Password:
chown mootiny:mootiny wordpress-database-backup.sql
chown mootiny:mootiny wordpress-backup.zip

Migrating the WordPress Website to the New Host

Now migrate your files to your new host. In case you haven’t noticed, this is exactly how you’d perform disaster recovery on a WordPress website that’d been compromised or suffered a hardware failure or anything else catastrophic. As well, it’s not far from manually deploying WordPress from the terminal either.

Go ahead and use SFTP (which comes bundled with OpenSSH) to connect to your new host and transfer your backup for restoration and recovery.

sftp <destination host>
put wordpress-database-backup.sql
put wordpress-backup.zip

Now we simply extract the WordPress files on their new host. Then we will fix the file permissions. Create an empty database, database user and restore the SQL database at it’s new home.

Change directories to webroot (if that’s where you want WordPress to live). Extract the files and proceed to log into the SQL server.

cd /var/www/html
sudo unzip ~/wordpress-backup.zip

Next we connect to our MariaDB server and create a shell for our WordPress website to move into.

sudo mysql -u root -p
Password:
MySQL> create database wp_database;
MySQL> grant all privileges on wp_database.* to 'wp_db_user'@localhost identified by 'wp_db_password';
MySQL> flush privileges;
MySQL> quit;

Now that we have a skeleton in place, all we need to do is restore the SQL content by populating the database with a quick one-liner and fix the file permissions and we’re golden!

mysql -u wp_db_user -p wp_database < wordpress-database-backup.sql

Setting the Correct Permissions after our WordPress Migration

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html
find /var/www/html -type d -exec chown 755 {} \;
find /var/www/html -type f -exec chown 644 {} \;

And you’re done, browse to your new host and login through the web interface, like normal. :)