How do you copy a thirty bees development installation over to the production environment/folder?

[thirtybirbs]

How do you copy a thirty bees development installation over to the production environment/folder?

After you've finished configuring your shop, changing the theme and adding products inside a development installation, how do you go about transferring that over to a production site?

Do you have to re-install it with a different folder and database, and then reconfigure it? Or do you just copy the entire filetree and database over to the production folder and change some values?

If the proper method is copying files over, how do you do that while maintaining the correct file and folder permissions (linux)?

Also, I noticed when exporting the categories to CSV, it only exports the order, title and description - not all the configurations ilke meta keywords, picture etc. Do categories need to be set up individually or is there someway I can do everything in a csv file or otherwise?

[Traumflug]

First, congratulations to your choice of doing a development installation, then copying that to the public server. That's not exactly popular, still a very sane and safe strategy.

Steps to do:

1. Set your development shop into maintenance mode (back office -> Preferences -> Maintenance)
2. Make a backup of your database.
3. Copy all the files over.
4. Restore the database on the public server from that backup, same database name, same database user, same password.
5. Go to back office -> Preferences -> SEO & URLs and set all three, Shop domain, SSL domain and Base URI according to your public server. Before doing so, only back office is accessible.
6. Remove maintenance mode on the public server.
7. Enjoy a working shop.

Regarding 5.: I mean I had pushed some patches to allow automatic domains, eliminating this step, but apparently those didn't make it into 1.0.4, yet.

Regarding file permissions: all files and directories have to be writable by the PHP user and readable by the web server (which is usually the same user). With this demand met, the shop should work. FTP upload should take care of setting such permissions.

[Traumflug]

P.S.: regarding 4: if you can't have the same database user/password in your development installation vs. your public server, you have to edit config/settings.inc.php before doing the upload. What needs change is pretty obvious in there.