wk8 / wordpress-db-migration

Searches and replaces through a WP DB's dump file to change the site's URL

WordPress DB migration

It can be a pain to migrate your WordPress website from your dev environment to another one, or to change your domain name.

This little script's goal is to make it easy: just export the DB to a SQL file, then run

./wp-db-migrate.py --from '<OLD_URL>' --to '<NEW_URL>' --in '<path/to/old_db.sql>' --out '<path/to/new_db.sql>'

For example to deploy your dev copy on localhost/my_site to your live site at my_site.com, assuming you have a dumb of your dev DB at ~/my_site/dump.sql:

./wp-db-migrate.py --from 'http://localhost/my_site' --to 'http://my_site.com' --in '~/my_site/dump.sql' --out '/tmp/migrated_dump.sql'

will create /tmp/migrated_dump.sql with the migrated DB you then just need to import into your live server(s).

Note that the input file (old DB file) won't be modified in any way, but the output file (new DB) will be overwritten if it exists.

It's a very simple script, but I always welcome feedback, pull requests, bug reports...

A few details

Migrates both string data and 'serialized' (in the WordPress sense) data.

Processes the input file in linear time and constant memory.

Note that I'm aware that WordPress offers a functionality to do just that, but you do need to have access to the running site to do it, which is not always the case (old dev copy, or else long-lost domain name...) And even if you do have access to a running instance, this allows to script it!