Making a Backup or Development Site

To create a standalone version of this site on your local machine for testing and development, use the following procedure.

  1. Get the latest backup copy of the site, possibly by running backup_newsite.sh - as per the instructions here.
  2. Extract this file to where you want your backup to go:
    1. tar xzf {name-of-backup}.gz
  3. You will need to chmod the sites/default/files directory to something permissive enough to allow the web server to write to it (777 is ok for a local development site; not really advisable on a live site), as well as the database file (currently .acl.sqlite) contained within it.
    1. chmod 777 sites/default/files
    2. chmod 777 sites/default/files/.acl.sqlite
  4. There is a (hidden) .htaccess file in the site's root. If you are using Apache as your local webserver, this file will get read and will cause an error, due to some settings that are specific to 1and1. You will know you have encountered this problem if you are seeing the text of index.php rather than having it execute and build the site for you. So, if you see raw php code in your browser and nothing that looks like the ACL site, this has probably happened. To fix it, exit .htaccess to remove (or comment out) the following line:
    • AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

At this point the test site should work, provided you have correctly set up your web server. For Apache, "correctly setting up your webserver" probably means creating a virtual host that serves the project directory. See here for some instructions on how to do that.