Setup Development Environment for Website hosted on GoDaddy

by Niharika J | Jul 23, 2020 | Wordpress

Why do we need to set up Development Environment On Godaddy?

Sometimes we need to make some changes on our live site that can affect our website. That’s why we need a copy of our live site. so, that we can do changes to the website without affecting the live site. That copied site is called “Development Environment”, Where the developers can do changes and preview it before uploading it to the live site.

How to do Setup Development Environment On GoDaddy

Once your WordPress website has gone live, you need to have a development website to implement further functionalities. Your development environment must be a copy of your original website. Having a development environment for a website is helpful that, if we want any advanced features to be implemented on our website, implementing it directly on a live website is dangerous because a small mistake may affect our website. So we may lose our website. But if we have a development environment, we can implement any feature there first, test it, and then copy it to our live website.

To Create a Development environment for your Website hosted on GoDaddy, follow the below process,

Create a Subdomain

First, we need to create a Subdomain for our development website, to create a subdomain,

Go to GoDaddy cPanel, find the DOMAINS section, and then click on Subdomains

Cpanel overview of godaddy

Now create a new Subdomain for your Development website. Give your Subdomain a name, select your website Domain, keep Document Root as default, and then click on Create.

Create subdomain cpanel

Copy Main Website files into Subdomain

To create a replica of the Live website, we need to copy all the files from the Main website root directory to Subdomain.

Go to GoDaddy cPanel, select File Manager

File manager in Setup Development Environment for Website hosted on GoDaddy

Go to your main website root directory, select all the files from there and click on Copy

directory in Setup Development Environment for Website hosted on GoDaddy

In the popup box, give your Subdomain root directory path and click on Copy Files.

copy directory screen

Now, check your subdomain directory, you will see all files there.

Copy the Main website database to the new database

After copying all the website files, we now need to copy the main website database to make sure the development website and live website are the same.

To create a Database replica, go to MySQL Database Wizard from the cPanel DATABASES section.

mysql in cpanel

Give your new Database a name and proceed with the Next Step.

mysql db vizard

In the next step, create a user for your database

mysql db vizard Setup Development Environment for Website hosted on GoDaddy

Now give access to the User on your preference, to provide admin level access, you can check ALL PRIVILEGES and click on complete. Your new database is ready now.

previlleges list cpanel

Click on phpMyAdmin now to access your databases.

Phpmyadmin cpanel

Click on Live website Database and then click on Export option to export all the databases.

Export tbl cpanel

Now click on the new development database, click on the import button, browse the exported file, and then click on GO.

db import in Setup Development Environment for Website hosted on GoDaddy

Change Configuration of Development website

After copying Website Files and Database, we need to change the database settings and configurations, otherwise, there is a chance that of appearing on Google search then it will be a redirection of your traffic.

First, we need to change the Home URL and Site URL in the database, to do so, please select the wp_options table in the new database and change Home URL and Site URL from the Live website URL to Development website URL.

db wp-options tbl cpanel Setup Development Environment for Website hosted on GoDaddy

After changing your Site URL and Home URL, now from the File Manager, go to the development website root directory and then edit the wp-config.php file, change the Database Name, User Name, and Password to the new Database Name, User Name and Password and then save the changes.

wp-config file Setup Development Environment for Website hosted on GoDaddy

Disable SSL for Development Website

Once you change all the configuration and settings, you now need to disable SSL for the development website means, your development website should be HTTP instead of HTTPS.