Installing Vagrant and VVV (and moving from an old instance to new)

Step 1

Install VirtualBox.

Step 2

Install VVV via git clone into your chosen dir (Here I’m using my-project-dir as a generic name).

git clone https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV.git my-project-dir

Step 3

Install vagrant-hostsupdater plugin:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater

Step 4

Install vagrant-triggers plugin:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-triggers

Importing existing databases

(Hopefully you had vagrant-triggers installed in your last VVV instance, which backed up your sql databases to the /database/backups/ directory.) If not, the following won’t apply.

Step 1

In the /database directory of your new instance:

Make a copy of init-custom.sql.sample and rename it to init-custom.sql. In init-custom.sql add the following commands (change DATABASE_NAME to your database name):

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `DATABASE_NAME`;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `DATABASE_NAME`.* TO 'wp'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'wp';

Step 2

In the /database directory of your new instance, create a /backups directory:

cd /database
mkdir backups

Step 3

Meanwhile, in the database/backups/ directory of your old VVV instance, copy SITENAME.sql of whichever databases you want to import into the database/backups/ directory of your new instance.

Search and replace in SQL database

To replace values in db, e.g. siteurl, pull db down from phpMyAdmin (via export), or make a copy from database/backups/SITENAME.sql, make changes, then import via phpMyAdmin.

Configuring hosts

#1) vvv-hosts

Step 1

In the www directory of your new VVV instance, create SITENAME/ directory:

cd www
mkdir SITENAME

Step 2

Next, cd into the SITENAME directory and create a vvv-hosts file:

touch vvv-hosts

Step 3

Open the vvv-hosts file and add SITENAME.dev. Save and close.

#2) nginx-config/sites

Follow the instructions here under Nginx Configuration to create SITENAME.conf in the config/nginx-config/sites/ directory.

Start the engine

vagrant provision

Otherwise, if your VM is already running, use reload:

vagrant reload --provision

This will import the sql database from the database/backups directory and load it into the VM, among other things. A full VM provision usually takes a few minutes. Go make a cup of coffee.

Next steps

For wordpress development, we will still need to ensure that our www/SITENAME/ directory includes an htdocs directory with a standard wordpress install and all our themes and plugins in their associated directories within the wp-content directory.