Duplicate blog to laptop VM

I started to write this blog post and then realized that in the process of making a copy of my blog on my laptop I whacked my connection to WordPress. But, it was easy to resolve it by disconnecting Jetpack from WordPress, clearing my browser cache, and then reconnecting. Whew! I worried that messing with this stuff would cause some problem but the blog still seems to work.

My idea was to bring up a copy of this blog site on a VirtualBox VM on my laptop. I have thought about doing this in the past but did not have any good reason to do so. I have mainly acted like an end user for this blog software and to iPage, the company that hosts it. I have not tried to delve into the underlying PHP code or mess with the MySQL database. But, my database team has recently started supporting MySQL and I am trying to train myself up a bit so it made sense to play with duplicating this small MySQL app.

I duplicated the blog in three main steps:

  1. Setup a VirtualBox VM
  2. Setup a MySQL database
  3. Setup the web site

STEP 1 – SETUP A VIRTUALBOX VM

I am still using the VirtualBox NAT networking that I described in an earlier post. I created a VM called Blog with this ip and port forwarding details:

Blog ip

10.0.2.17

Blog port forwarding

61014 to 22
61015 to 80

I duplicated an existing Oracle Enterprise Linux 7 VM and modified the ip and setup the port forwarding. Then I did a yum update to catch up all the existing packages. I also disabled the firewall so that it would not get in the way.

yum -y update
systemctl disable firewalld
systemctl stop firewalld

STEP 2 – SETUP MYSQL DATABASE

I downloaded mysql57-community-release-el7-11.noarch.rpm from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/repo/yum/ and ran the following commands to install MySQL:

yum localinstall mysql57-community-release-el7-11.noarch.rpm
yum install mysql-community-server
service mysqld start
service mysqld status

Then I ran a series of SQL commands logged into MySQL to setup the user and database for the blog:

grep 'temporary password' /var/log/mysqld.log

mysql -uroot -p
use temporary root password

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Bl0gC0py!';

CREATE DATABASE blogdb;

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON blogdb.* TO "blogdbuser"@"localhost"
IDENTIFIED BY "Bl0gC0py!";

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

EXIT

Next I took a backup of my blog database that I got from iPage and made the following string replacements in the SQL commands:

Replace all instances of

https://www.bobbydurrettdba.com

with 

http://localhost:61015

Also

bobby@bobbydurrettdba.com

replace with

bobby@blogvm.com

and

@bobbydurrettdba

with

@blogvm

Finally

bobbydurrettdba

with 

blogvm

I was trying to make sure that I didn’t whack anything in my real blog and that it worked with my localhost:61015 web site host name and port. I had to add two lines to the beginning of the sql script to make it work:

use blogdb
SET sql_mode = '';

I ran the script like this:

mysql -v --force -ublogdbuser -pBl0gC0py! < database.sql > database.out 2> database.err

I checked database.err and it only had a warning about using the password on the command line.

STEP3 – SETUP WEB SITE

Now that the database was setup and loaded with data I worked on the web site.

First, I installed the Linux packages for php which pulled in the web server as a dependency:

yum install php php-common php-mysql php-gd php-xml php-mbstring php-mcrypt 

Edited httpd.conf to setup web server:

vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Replace all instances of AllowOverride None or none
with AllowOverride all

Added VirtualHost lines at the end:

Added host to /etc/hosts

vi /etc/hosts

add this line 

127.0.0.1  blog

I forgot to mention in step 1 that when I created the VM I renamed it to blog using hostnamectl.

Next I created the web site directory and populated it with files from my ftp backup of my website.

mkdir /var/www/html/wordpress

copy my blog files to /var/www/html/wordpress

Next I edited the WordPress configuration file to work with the database:

cd /var/www/html/wordpress

vi wp-config.php

/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'blogdb');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'blogdbuser');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'Bl0gC0py!');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

Finally I restarted the web server and set the web server to automatically start on reboot:

systemctl restart httpd.service 

systemctl enable httpd.service

Finally, I tested the web site at http://localhost:61015 and it looked a lot like this blog site.

Bobby

About Bobby

I live in Chandler, Arizona with my wife and three daughters. I work for US Foods, the second largest food distribution company in the United States. I have worked in the Information Technology field since 1989. I have a passion for Oracle database performance tuning because I enjoy challenging technical problems that require an understanding of computer science. I enjoy communicating with people about my work.
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