Proper Process To Create a Duplicate Local Site

Developer help Installation
1

I have successfully followed the instructions to create a running local copy of my ghost site (production hosted with ghost). I can successfully make changes locally, update production, and even created my own theme version and am using that.

What’s the correct process for creating a duplicate of a local running instance so that I have a true sandbox locally I can play around with and not impact my stage local copy for production?

I tried the following:

  1. copy the entire local folder
  2. edit the json config file for a different port and different file paths to match new folder
  3. in that new folder did a ghost buster, ghost check-update, and ghost update (5.22.4 to 5.22.6 I think)

My thought was I could then do a ghost run in each of the folders and have each running on those separate ports. But something’s amiss. I can get the second site to APPEAR to come up on the second port, but I can’t get in to the admin area. And when I do a ghost list it seems to reference it as the first site.

So obviously there’s a more correct way to replicate a site locally and have each one runnable.

What is that process?

Thanks much.

2

The way I’d approach this is to install your second Ghost instance:

ghost install local
(The CLI will handle setting up the server on a new port)

From your first site, go to Settings → Labs and export your posts. Then, upload that file to your first site. Finally, I’d copy the images folder from your first site (content/images) to your new site.

For the custom theme, I keep it in a project folder and symlink to the Ghost content/themes folder. You can also copy the theme folder into that directory.

You’ll have two local instances of the same site running simultaneously.

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