If you use CiviCRM you know that moving a site is problematic. This is caused by CiviCRM storing vital information in a couple of configuration files, which are tedious and error-prone to fix by hand.

If you are using Joomla with CiviCRM there is a handy utility from Akeeba, Akeeba UNiTe to take unattended backups from a site, remotely or as a backup file, and restore it locally or at a staging site. But you will still have the problem above.

UNiTE allows you to run a custom script after restoring the site. Enter CiviCRM4JoomlaFixer.

unite.yaml is an example configuration for UNiTE that you can tweak for your situation. It will run the fixer script at the end of the restore.

The script figures out most of the old and new values by itself from the restored site. The only thing it cannot know is the URL to the restored site. This has to be passed as an environment variable, NEW_WEB_HOST when executing the script and thus the unite command:

NEW_WEB_HOST=<yournewhost> unite restore unite.yaml

The script will print all old and new values that it uses to fix the CiviCRM configuration files so that you can check that they will work.

I use devilbox to run multiple local sites under separate subdomains under localhost (actually a domain that always points back to 127.0.0.1 such as localhost.tv, dvl.to or similar).

Then I have a script that uses the last part of the current directory as the subdomain and creates a unite.yaml with that. As I use the domain name as dbname, dbuser, dbpassword in the database I can completely automate a restore.

You can find that script in restore_to_devil_box.sh.