Migrating phpBB From Windows to Linux

Here, we will be discussing how one can migrate phpBB site from a hosted Windows/IIS platform to Apache Web server

Thursday, September 03, 2009

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For hosting applications on web, some organizations go for hosted setup which is good if you have a small setup. However, if the requirement keep increasing, then hosting the application inhouse makes more sense . This will not require you to pay extra as in a hostel model.

For example, you are running a phpBB site on a hosted model. Also, you have enabled the attachment feature in PHPBB. And as we know, in a hosted model an increase in space means extra cost for you. Now, say you want to scale your IT infrastructure, and you have sufficient bandwidth and hardware resources to host it in your domain. So it's better to migrate the phpBB site in house. Now for instance, the vendor has deployed the application on a Windows Server with IIS as web server, and you like to migrate it to Apache for it's free. How do you do it? Here, we show you how.

While migrating one should check the compatibility of the application with the new environment. For example, there might be a path specified to store some data which is likely to be in Windows format. You should change this accordingly to Linux. In addition, there might be some settings done on IIS that needs to be manually configured on Apache.

In a hosted setup, there is a front end application which lets you manage everything on your server. So first of all, download the phpBB folder in compressed format using that front end. For this, open up the file browser using the front end panel and select the phpBB folder. Choose the option Compress and download. If your current setup doesn't have any front end, i.e. you have a server hosted at the data center, then navigate to the Web root folder and download the phpBB folder.

Now you have to download the database. Since phpBB uses MySQL database, create MySQL dump file and download it. For this, run the following command on the prompt:

Prompt: mysqldump databasename t1 > dump.sql

This demo is done taking the assumption that the database is MySQL. In the next issue, we will be talking on how to migrate from different databases.

If you have phpmyadmin installed, then navigate to the export option and export the database as SQL dump file. And then download the dump file and save it on a local machine.

Next comes, setting up the application -the Linux system. We used Debian 5 Linux for this. Setting up PHP and Apache on it was a breeze. All it required was to first install Apache using the # apt-get install apache2, followed by another single line command to install PHP and MySQL, viz. # apt-get install php5 mysql php5-mysql.N ext dump the phpBB folder to the web root folder of Apache and restore the SQL dump file to MySQL. To restore the SQL dump file, run the following command:
# mysql db_name < dump.sql

And that's all. Now open up the site and you have migrated on to the new platform.

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