11.8. Making a Development Site

Make a database dump file from your live site’s database. Try one of the following methods:

Edit the sites/default/settings.php file under your development site’s top-level directory in a plain-text editor. Find the lines near the end that contain the database name, database username, and database password, and update them to the information about the development site database you set up. The lines look something like this (before editing):

$databases['default']['default'] = array (
  'database' => 'live_site_database_name',
  'username' => 'live_site_database_username',
  'password' => 'live_site_database_password',

Check whether your settings.php file has the following setting; if yes, then you will need to edit this to point to your development site URL instead of your production site URL:

$settings['trusted_host_patterns']

Import the database dump file you created, into the development site’s database. Try one of the following methods:

If your development and live sites need to have different configuration, then you have to use configuration overrides in the settings.php file. The $config variable will help you maintain override values separately from the standard configuration data. For instance, you might want the site name to be "Anytown Farmers Market" on the production site, but "Development Site for Anytown Farmers Market" on the development site. To do that, you could have the production value in the site configuration (in the database), and on the development site, in the settings.php file, you would need to have:

$config['system.site']['name'] = "Development Site for Anytown Farmers Market";