Migrating your existing WordPress install might be a headache especially if you are not a developer or run a high traffic site. EE is currently used by many high traffic WordPress sites globally. In addition to this headache playing with containers is not everyone’s cup of tea. Let’s find out how you can migrate your existing WordPress install to EE v4 without much efforts.

Step 1: Backup you existing WP files and its respective Database

All you need is a wp-content directory as a backup and your DB backup. There is absolutely no need to copy all files and folders simply because all of your plugins, themes and images are stored in wp-content directory.

Simply take a backup of wp-content directory in a tar.gz file format and your DB in sql file format. Place this file in your html directory or a directory which is exposed to port 80.

Note: if you have played with wp-content or wp architecture for custom development, you need to make the necessary changes and migrated those files / folders accordingly.

Step 2: Install EE v4 on a brand new server

In order to install EE v4, you need a new server which does not have any other tools or scripts preinstalled. We use and recommend Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server from Digital Ocean.

Login into your new server and copy paste the following command as below:

wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee4 && sudo bash ee

This will automatically download EE v4 scripts, Docker etc and also install them. Now, create site with your existing site name using

ee site create example.com --type=wp --php=7.3 --cache --ssl=le

The above command will create site with your domain and install WP as well as setup Redis for you. It will also setup SSL for your domain. Just save the site info in Notepad which includes WordPress and DB credentials.

Login into PhpMyAdmin using DB credentials from your browser through the following url

http://domain.com/ee-admin/pma/ and select all tables from the DB and drop them.

Step 3: Migrate your existing WP

After you drop all the tables from DB either import your existing db backup from phpmyadmin if the size of your .sql file is in few MBs. Else, import it using the following command through CLI

cat backup.sql | docker exec -i CONTAINER /usr/bin/mysql -u root –password=root DATABASE

All of your WP Files and Folders are located here /opt/easyengine/sites/example.com/app/htdocs

Now, change directory using

cd opt/easyengine/sites/example.com/app/htdocs

and delete existing wp-content using

rm -rf wp-content

Download your existing backup in the same directory using

wget http://example.com/file.tar.gz

Extract the file using

tar -zxvf file.tar.gz

Now, change ownership and permission of  wp-content directory by using

chown -R www-data:www-data wp-content

Lastly, edit your wp-config.php file and ensure that you replace table prefix with your current table prefix used in your DB and save the necessary changes.

Change  NameServers or A record IP to the new one. Login into your wp dashboard and just save permalinks once.

Its Done. Your site is now live on your new server.