Moving Magento from development to production

Once you are ready to move your development environment to the production environment, there are few things that you have to take care in Magento to avoid some issues.

Before beginning it is always a best practice and safe to back up your database irrespective of any platform you are working on. This is the golden rule that would save you when things go wrong.

So now lets dive into issues that is specific to the Magento platform that one may face during the migration of development environment to that of production.

Copying all the files

Copy all the folders and files in the Magento root directory and make sure you don’t copy the cache files under “Var” folder to the production environment.

Environment configuration

The production server must be configured with all php libraries that the development environment uses and your development code uses.

Permission settings

Make sure the permission settings used is same as the development environment, unless your development environment permission settings doesn’t comply to the security.

so as a rule of thumb it is always a good practice to set your development environment with necessary permission levels, keeping security in mind. Avoid setting permission mode to “777″ when its not needed.

Configuring the database

Import the database that you backed up to the production environment. If you have used a different a database name or db credentials for production environment, you need to configure the connection settings in the /app/etc/local.xml file.

        
                    
                    
                    
                    
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Setting up the site domain

You have to execute the following query in order to setup the database to point to the production environment.

   UPDATE core_config_data SET value = 'http://productionserver.com/' WHERE config_id IN (11,12);

This step is very important in setting up the production environment for Magento. Failing to do this, may result in redirection to your development server.

Delete Test Data

Delete all the test data from the system by deleting them from the admin panel. To delete the test orders that you placed in the development environment follow this tutorial .

Reindex the data

Go to the admin panel. Click on the “Index Management” under “System”. Select all rows and reindex data.

Refresh Statistics

Click “Report/Refresh Statistics” and select all rows to refresh the statistics. Select “Refresh Lifetime Statistics” and click submit.

Switch off test mode

Make sure you disable the test mode for your payment gateway in the system.

The above said steps should help your Magento site published live.