How to do a staging with Softaculous?

Updating something on our site, modifying a code or changing the configuration of a plugin can (and does) cause errors and/or incompatibilities. Suddenly our site can look different, even break. For this reason, we are grateful that there are tools such as Softaculous Staging. In this guide we explain how to take advantage of it... and make changes in peace.

Duplika includes Softaculous Premium in all our plans web hosting.

Test clone

tool staging, or "staging," allows us to quickly make a copy of our site without compromising online content. Thus, we do tests, updates, try new features or whatever, and all without risk. When we're done, because everything works as we wanted it to, we move the changes to the public site.

To start, we must enter the cPanel of our website:

cpanel.oursite.com

After having placed the relevant credentials, we look for the Softaculous icon in the Software section.

Next, we will click on the following button:

And then we'll find and click on the blue icon that looks like interlinked computers:

On the screen that will appear, we can make some decisions:

We must choose the protocol of our site among the possible options: http://www, http://, https:// and https://www.

Then we will select the site to clone. If we have only one, it will appear by default.

Next, we are allowed to enter a folder name, for example, example.com/test. This is optional, but remember that we will then visit our test site at example.com/test

We can also change the name of the database (optional).

Then, just click on the blue “Create Staging” button. When the progress ends, we will see a success message.

Testing our test site

After having made a copy of our public site, we can now implement changes and tests freely and without fear. Update a Theme, the WordPress version, a plugin, modify functions.php or whatever: no one will see the changes until we decide. Upon completion, we can remove the test site or replace the online content with the changes made to the clone.
Note: making changes to our online site does not affect our clone either.

Replace our online site

Satisfied with the changes, experiments, updates or anything else carried out on the test site, we can replace our live website with a couple of clicks. Note that we can also keep our test site intact, in case we want to run more tests in the future. This returns the tool staging from Softaculous a great way to protect our content from any issues that a mod might cause.

Let's see how to replace the online site with the "staged" or cloned site, step by step.

As we did before, we'll log into cPanel, look for Softaculous in the Software section, and go to active installations.

Next to our cloned site, we must click on the “push to live” button, that is, send all the changes to the public site.

Next, we will choose the customization tab (Customize) to be able to make some decisions. Among them, decide if we want to overwrite the files and folders, replace the public database with the clone database (if, for example, we receive messages on our blog in the middle, they will be lost), or decide what things in the database data change.

We check at discretion what we want to upload online. After finishing, we will click on the blue button indicated in the upper screenshot. Just like when we created the test clone, we will see a progress bar followed by a success message.

That is all! We hope that the guide has been very easy for you and, as always, we encourage you to leave your doubts in the comments section. Good luck and thanks for reading.