I have been trying to import an existing site so I can work on it within quickstart and for several reasons I keep having problems. I was thinking it might be helpful for people in general if there was some documentation or a screencast on how to take their existing site and work with it on quickstart.

I would do this if I could get my site working but I have not been able to. I have had issues copying site files from my Mac OS X Lion host, which might be a ext4 file system issue? I have also had problems importing the database using drush and phpMyAdmin.

Comments

MichaelCole’s picture

Hi chrowe,

Drush 5 may be able to backup and restore a site. If not that, then manually :-)

Cheers,

Mike

l_o_l’s picture

To bring a website from its remote original server to quickstart for developing some extra module.
After some experimenting this is what works for me with drush 5.8 on both the remote and the local (quickstart) machines:

  1. On original website: drush ard. This results is an archive file. Its one zipped file with every Drupal core and otherwise file in plus the whole db.
  2. Bring zipped file to root of /websites
  3. In /websites type: drush qsc mysite.dev. This will create a website with all of the regular quickstart settings, like the related db, being locally accessable as http://mysite.dev and creating a drush alias.
  4. In /websites type: sudo drush arr my_site_archive_file.tar.gz --destination=/home/quickstart/websites/mysite.dev --db-url=mysql://mysite_dev:mysite_dev@localhost/mysite_dev --overwrite. This will extract everything from the archive file and put it in the freshly created website. Hence the 'overwrite' option. Please not all the 'mysite' variations in the command, these have to be replaced by the name of your website. Because quickstart works is a predictable way, this will work. Please note that drush will automatically adjust the db settings from its remote settings to the settings of the locally created website. Thank you drush !
  5. The previous all works, but somewhere the permissions get mixed up and the website now became inaccessable... Therefore its needed to type: sudo chmod 777 mysite_dev. This will makes everything accessable to all users. But as I use it for local development only, that is no problem to me.
  6. Finished