Move exisiting site in web hosting provider to QuickStart for installing modules or apps

Hi Transition, this is a common question, and it doesn't have a simple answer.

Quickstart is several things, integrated into one package:
1) A LAMP server
2) A set of pre-configured tools for debugging (Netbeans + XDebug, etc)
3) A few drush commands to reduce repetitive work.
4) Pre-configured and downloadable as a virtual machine.

An older project can be moved onto the LAMP server, like any other PHP project. Configure DNS, Apache, MySQL, and settings.php to point to mysql. This requires understanding how LAMP servers are configured to run projects.

Once the older project is in the LAMP server, the debugging tools should work.

Unfortunately, the drush commands can't figure it out without a human understanding it. There is not yet a common standard for packaging a php website for deployment.

What you can do is look at this: drush help quickstart-create

This will show all the options for quickstart-create and get you on your way. Remember you need to setup dns, apache, mysql, and the code. If you're bringing in an old site, you might:

1) create a folder ~/websites/oldsite.dev
2) copy the site's files into oldsite.dev
3) drush quickstart-create dns apache mysql --domain=oldsite.dev
4) (import the site's sql into the database oldsite_dev)
5) edit sites/default/settings.php to point to the oldsite_dev database (user and password are also oldsite_dev)
6) Point a browser at oldsite.dev to test

Mike

I also googled a little bit about how this can be done and found two articles that might add value to MichaelCole's informative reply.

They are:

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1. Quick Drush Tip – Import database SQL with drush sql-cli (sqlc) by By WIZONE SOLUTIONS | Published: MARCH 28, 2011
http://www.wizonesolutions.com/2011/03/28/quick-drush-tip-import-databas...

2. How to move a Drupal site from one host to another Drupal Hosting and Installation by anonymous
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/hosting-guide/publish-your-site/ho...

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Hope they can be helpful

Indeed, I tried what MichaelCole said. Everything went smoothly until when I tested the site. A warning message pops up, saying "failed to open stream: "DrupalTemporaryStreamWrapper::stream_open" call failed in file_create_htaccess() (line 5............"

I read the post http://drupal.org/node/1076762. It seems that they encountered the same problem and had it solved. But frankly, I dont know what they meant. Keep working on this issue.

---------------------updates on 8 Oct 2011--------------------------
I found a solution from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Drupal#Write_Access

By typing the following commands:

sudo chown www-data:www-data -R /home/quickstart/Desktop/websites/mysitename.dev
sudo chown www-data:www-data -R /home/quickstart/Desktop/websites/mysitename.dev/tempdir
sudo chown www-data:www-data -R /home/quickstart/Desktop/websites/mysitename.dev/sites/default/files

Then, the warning message ""failed to open stream: "DrupalTemporaryStreamWrap...." will be gone and Im stoked.

If you want to change the permission of a certain file that is locked (e.g. template.php), you can go to its location and type:

sudo chmod 777 filename

You will change its permission to read ad write for owner, groups and others (in my case they are all www-data). And now you can edit and save the file very easily.

I know this might sound stupid to some experienced drupal people here. But to those who are newbies like me and show interest in learning this stuff, hope they find it useful.

Also, all those things I wrote in this comment are only based on my understanding from desktop search and personal experiment on ubuntu. So, it may not be the best method. Please correct me if Im wrong.