Clone a Magento website
Test additional functions without harming a live website.
In this tutorial I outline a method I use to create a clone and use this to test changes. Making a working clone can take hours of setup time and does include purchasing a basic PC , but I think pays off in the long run.
Lets break this down into stages
- Hardware
- Operating System
- Required system software
- Installing the clone.
- Testing the clone.
Hardware
In selecting the platform on which to run a clone you have a few methods available. There are various software solutions like XAMPP which allows to to simulate a server on your own PC. I have used this method and it does work but I felt some ‘low level’ configuration functionality were unobtainable. So for this reason I oped to build a dedicated hardware solution. In searching for a cheap PC to run Linux I found that hybrid systems always had issues and over complicated what I wanted to achieve.
The solution is to buy ‘old’ HP/DELL systems and boost the RAM to the maximum. I use the Optiplex GX620 without any issues. Tested platforms are the Centos and Ubuntu operating systems running both Apache and Nginx webserver platforms.
Software
The solution is to buy ‘old’ HP/DELL systems and boost the RAM to the maximum. I use the Optiplex GX620 without any issues. Tested platforms are the Centos and Ubuntu operating systems running both Apache and Nginx webserver platforms.