Drupal 5 : Migrating a Production Database To a QA Server

Building on the configuration management strategy I described last time, I wrote some scripts to make it easier for other developers to migrate the production database to the QA server or to get a copy of the production database for their local system. I needed to consider the following factors:

• Domain name changes: Because we use Domain Access to serve multiple subdomains using a single Drupal installation and shared sign-on, we needed to make sure that all instances of the domain root are replaced and the correct domain_root is set.

  For example, the site URLs might be:

  Production	QA	Local
  example.com	qa.example.com	local.example.com
  foo.example.com	foo.qa.example.com	foo.local.example.com
  bar.example.com	bar.qa.example.com	bar.local.example.com

   

• Privacy concerns: The QA database and local copies of the database should not contain sensitive user information. All users aside from the administrator should be removed from the system, and all content on site should be limited to editorial content.
  
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Courtesy : http://sachachua.com