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I find myself having to take over a decently managed website, I have very basic understanding of wordpress but I am an experienced software developer.
The first thing I was looking into is to create a staging website (which we’re lacking), I see that softaculous provides that feature, and it is already available on our cpanel, however it was never used: wordpress is not even installed on softaculous.
Am I safe using softaculous to scan exisiting wordpress installations and take it from there, or are there aspects I should be wary of before proceeding?
Thanks a a lot
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There are better ways. Install a blank wirdpress site elsewhere and use a wordpress plugin to duplicate the first site onto it. Multiple plugins for this.
I’d highly recommend learning how to move a site manually instead, as well as using WP backup/migration tools (UpdraftPlus, WPVivid, Duplicator, All In One Migrate). If you have basic level of web development knowledge, you’ll figure it out very quickly – WP is very simple to move.
I would keep the site untouched by Softaculous. If you can login via ssh, copy the prod site directory into another directory (say, copy [`example.com/`](http://example.com/) to `stage.example.com/`), then export the prod database and import it into a new database for the stage site. In the stage site directory, replace the production database details in `wp-config.php` with the stage database.
Edit: Also set the correct wp_siteurl and wp_home variables in `wp-config.php`.
Make sure you have a valid SSL certificate for the stage site.
Finally, create a new virtual host in the web server and point it to the stage site directory. You can use the same directives as your production site, but update the virtual host to the stage site address.