In this guide, we will show you how you can migrate your Magento store to Cloudways using an SSH terminal (command line). You need some basic knowledge of the command line to be able to complete the process.

If you have SSH access to your current hosting server, you can simplify the process by making an archive of your entire site first by using the 'tar' command. Run the following in your Magento’s webroot/public_html directory.

This will create a compressed file that you will need to migrate to your Cloudways server.

Next, you can transfer the backup file to your Cloudways servers by using the 'wget' or 'scp' command. In this guide, we are using 'wget' to transfer the backup.

To do this, connect to your Cloudways server using SSH and navigate to the public_html folder with this command. Here folder name is the name of your application.

Next, run the following command. This will download the backup file we created in the previous step to your Cloudways server.

Next, decompress the contents in the current folder using the following command.

Once the above is done, you can safely remove the backup.tar.gz from your old server.

In this step, you will make a backup of the database in your current hosting server. To backup your database, we recommend using SSH or a tool like PHPMyAdmin.

Log into your old server with SSH as we did in Step #1. Once you are there, run the following command (replace dbUsername and dbName with the database username and database name of your old server):

This will create a dump of your database and save it as db_backup.sql in the current directory. If you don’t have SSH access, contact your current host for assistance on how to back up the database.

Now we will restore the database dump we took into our Cloudways server. Again, open an SSH session to your Cloudways server with the appropriate credentials and run the following commands (replace dbUsername and dbName with the database username and name that you can find in the application tab of your Cloudways Platform).

This will download the backup file from your old server to your Cloudways server and restore the data into the database named as dbName.

You may safey remove the db_backup.sql from your old server once you have restored the database successfully.

Edit the Magento configuration file to use the Cloudways server database.

Open the file local.xml under the public_html/app/etc/ directory with your favorite text editor. Here we have used vim to edit the local.xml file as shown above. Remove the old entries and input the new Cloudways application details.

Important

You can also use the SFTP File Manager for modifications in the file. We have used the SSH method in this KB.

Save the file and exit.

Go to the folder var/cache inside your Magento root directory (public_html) and remove any file or folder that may exist.

Make sure you are in /var/cache before running the command above!

That’s it! You should now be able to open your Magento website from your Cloudways server. You can check that all is working fine updating your local hosts file and pointing to your Cloudways server.

Once you are happy with how your site works on the new server, you can take your site live.

That’s it! We hope this article was helpful. If you need any help, then feel free to search your query on Cloudways Support Center or contact us via chat (Need a Hand > Send us a Message). Alternatively, you can also create a support ticket.

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