Steps to create a development Joomla environment

Question

Our live CIVICRM environment is CiviCRM 5.67.1, Joomla 4.4.2, PHP 8.1, hosted on Siteground.

We are in the process of trying to replicate our live site to a development site where we can configure and test changes prior to doing the same on our live site.

We have not been successful in our efforts to make this happen. What we have tried is backing the live site up with Akeeba and using that backup to restore to a dev slot. We have also tried the same with backups that Siteground executes to no avail.

Would greatly appreciate it if I could get the exact steps that need to be executed to create a development site in an enivironment as stated above. TIA.

Answer 1

The procedure works as follows:

1. Take a complete backup of the live-site via Akeeba Backup, incl. the whole DB.
2. Create a new domain/subdomain/staging environment
3. Create a new empty DB and a DB-user
4. Copy the backup-archive/-s (.jpa-file and .jp[0-9]-files) to your staging environment
5. Unpack the archive with Akeeba Kickstart
6. Run the ANGIE-installer, make sure to adjust DB-connection and -credentials to the new empty DB created in step 3
7. Adjust tmp- and log-path in ANGIE to match the new environment
8. Finish the restoration of the ported DB and files through Akeeba Backup.
9. Edit the two files civicrm.settings.php, one in administrator/components/com_civicrm and the second in components/com_civicrm: declare the new DB-connection and -credentials in those two files

That's it. You're done and should be able to run CiviCRM from your staging environment now.