Support

Hi there,

I was hoping I could get some support with using Akeeba Backup as a website staging solution. I've only used Akeeba in the past for restoring broken websites, but it was never for staging.

I think I'm mostly confused or worried about these things (let's just say for example sake, example.com is the live website and beta.example.com is the staged website):

- What are the exact steps for replacing a live website with a staged website?
(I would've thought you delete everything in the live website's directory, add the .jpa and kickstart.php and install, but my worry is that there's a lot of downtime as you delete and install).

- Is there any way to keep specific variables the same without having to change them all the time? Particularly logs/tmp paths which stay the same in global configuration.

- How exactly does the database copying work? Let's say there's db-main and db-beta. I develop the website beta.example.com which is linked to db-beta and is updated more than db-main. I plan to replace db-main with db-beta. How is this managed through Akeeba restoration?

Apologies if these questions are a little basic. I've visited some pages and the official staging documentation page and I understood the concept but I think I may need more detail. Thank you, much appreciated.

I use Plesk if that helps. If we had to use directories as example...

The main website would be in:
/var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/

and the beta website would be in:
/var/www/vhosts/example.com/beta.example.com/httpdocs/

All log files as are usually inside the 'httpdocs' folder of the respective directory.

It may not be strictly necessary to manually delete your files and drop your tables on the live site before the restore - but I ALWAYS do. The restore process works by extracting files from the archive and overwriting existing files on the site. If, for example, you change an extension so it doesn't exist any more in the staging site, those files and tables will be "orphaned" in the live site after the restore. They still exist, but Joomla! doesn't remember what to do with them. When changing major versions of Joomla!, 3.6 to 2.8, for example, you always need to start with a clean slate.

The backup process dumps your database to a series of SQL files stored in your backup archive. During the restore, these SQL files are imported into the new database, dropping existing tables and recreating them. Only the database you're restoring into is required during the restore.

You might take a look at UNiTE. The documentation is here: https://www.akeebabackup.com/documentation/unite.html. UNiTE is a command line program designed to backup and restore a site without human intervention. Nicholas uses it to transfer our site to a testing server every night so there is always a fresh testing site in case he needs to look at something in an offline environment. But it could be used to restore a testing site to a live site just as easily. UNiTE is a pretty advanced program, not for the faint of heart.

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