I have spent a long time building a store with Magento on my local development PC.
Now that I am happy with the result, I would like to upload it to my live production server.
What steps must I complete to ensure this move is as easy as possible?
I follow this tutorial http://magentoexplorer.com/how-to-move-or-transfer-magento-from-localhost-to-live-server and succeeded to move my Magento installation from Localhost (XAMPP) to live server. Simply, you can follow these 5 steps:
1. Export database of Magento site (SQL file)
Open PHPmyadmin to export your database to SQL file or you can run this command from SSH mysqldump -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASE > backup.sql
2. Upload code of Magento site to live server
Upload all files/folder from your localhost to live site using FTP client, you can zip and unzip file to make sure all files are preserved
3. Import database to live server and change database configuration.
Again, use PHPmyadmin to import the .sql file we export in step 1 or run this command from SSH mysql -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASE < backup.sql
4. Replace local URL with live site URL in database
Find the table core_config_data and edit url in column web/unsecure/base_url and web/secure/base_url to the domain of your live site
5. Pointing your domain to server’s IP
Hope this helps
