Chris K Designs » MySQL

Change your WordPress domain quickly with Linux, MySQL, and sed

Chris K — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 05:59:43 +0000

You have no idea how hard it was to refrain from using the command ‘sed’ in a totally ridiculous homophoned title. Have you found yourself wanting to change the domain on an established WordPress installation, or even trying to replicate many times over the same exact WordPress database on a different domain? Yeah, me too. I’ve found while doing plug-in development, it helps to have the same database information copied over when I start with a new branch. Luckily, Linux comes to the rescue with the sed command. It’s a 3 step process. Export your source/current database. Search and replace with sed, and then import the database. Here’s a step by step for you.

Note: you need to have access to a Linux command prompt and the MySQL database via command line in order to perform this by my steps

Export…

First, we need to make an export of your current database, we’ll do this with mysqldump:
[text light=true]$ mysqldump -h yourhostnamehere -u YourUserName -pYourPasswordHere YourDatabaseName > dumpfile.sql[/text]
No, I didn’t forget a space after the -p flag. There is no space between the password flag, and the password itself.

Search and Replace

After that completes you should have a file named dumpfile.sql that contains your current database. Now it’s time to search and replace all references to the previous domain (we’ll call it domain-one.com) with our new domain (domain-two.com).
[text light=true]$ sed -i ‘s/domain-one.com/domain-two.com/g’ dumpfile.sql[/text]
The ‘-i’ flag is for inline. I simply replaces domain-one.com with domain-two.com where the command finds it. This means, any database settings or posts referencing the domain itself, will be altered, and therefore work when imported….so on to importing.

Importing the newly modified .sql backup

[text light=true]$ mysql -h yourhostnamehere -u YourUserName -pYourPasswordHere YourDatabaseName < dumpfile.sql[/text]
This command with the < or less than sign, pushes dumpfile.sql up to the database mentioned.

And there you have it, you just exported, modified, and imported an entire WordPress site including all categories, posts, users, etc…into a new database for use on a different site. Not so bad was it?

For more information on the sed command you can head over to brunolinux.com for a pretty decent sed tutorial and more options.

Updated today, release 2.2!

Chris K — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:38:39 +0000

Could it be that the Updated Today plugin for WordPress has been updated to version 2.2 only a day later!? You better believe it.

I’ve added some more options to this one. You now can choose if post, pages, or both trigger the banner. You can also choose between the original post date or the modified date (or both) affect the banner. I hope you like the updates.

Cheers!

Updated Today plugin to 2.1.1

Chris K — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:06:33 +0000

I've been updated!

The Updated Today plugin for WordPress has been updated to version 2.1.1. I was fighting with the SVN so I’m sorry if you got a bad version during the process. It should all be updated and good to go. You can download it directly from WordPress if need be!

Thanks for the support.

Plugin Progress

Chris K — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:41:26 +0000

I have been working on the Updated Today Plugin and adding features. I decided to give you all a little preview of the progress. I have added a ‘Settings’ page for the plugin which can allow additional features. Some of them that you see already are the ability to move the image to the left or right of the page, the ability to turn off the pngfix javascript, and an image choosing feature that allows you to choose any image in the plugin directory. The next features will be the ability to upload your own image as well as a few other small things I think you will all like.

This is still in a rough development state and isn’t ready just yet for public use. Keep your eyes open for the public release very soon though! Leave some comments if you have feedback. So without further delay…screenshots!

The ability to choose some settings

The plugin now allows you to put the banner on the left or right.

PHP Script for MySQL Optimization and Backup

Chris K — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:15:57 +0000

The biggest complaint I hear from people who use MySQL driven sites on inexpensive shared hosting services is a decrease in performance over time. Most of the time this decrease is no fault of your hosting provider, but the cluttering of your database.

Like any computer storage device, a database is simply a collection of data that through time, use, and abuse can grow unorganized and cluttered. I uncovered a few scripts people had written in this article at noupe.com. Not only did I want to have my databases optimized, I also wanted the backups to be created. So what I have in for your enjoyment is a script that will optimize your database, backup the database to a file including the timestamp (to avoid overwriting), and it will also email you upon warnings and errors.

To install this script you place it in a folder that you can call something like ‘supersecretfoldername’ and put a password on this folder. When the script is run it places a backup in a folder named ‘_db_backups’ in the directory parent to the ‘supersecretfoldername’ folder.

As a bonus, if you use this in conjunction with GoDaddy hosting services, you can use this as a Cron Script to be run without your interaction and the backups will be in GoDaddy’s default database backup folder. GoDaddy’s Hosting Control Center will also email you the script results as part of their Cron Manager interface.

Download the script.

If you are using GoDaddy you will want to set the file permissions to ‘Executable’ through their ‘File Manager’ (Help Article). You can then use the ‘Cron Manager’ from within the ‘Content’ section of your Hosting Control Center. Here you can set the email address they will send your results to, your scripts, and their frequency