When you’ve have a website running on WordPress, it could be very handy to get a ‘offline’ copy of this website in your own environment. This could be a virtual machine of multiple machines in your data center. Here you can edit the website, whitout any impact for your visitors. Very usefull when you want to develop some new features, themes or new posts.
In this example I’m going to setup a new wordpress environment, running on my surfacebook (Hyper-V) in Windows Server 2019. This are the steps you need to take:
- Install Windows Server 2019 with the latest updates;
- Download Xampp
https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html - Download WordPress
https://wordpress.org/download/ - Edit the config of Xampp to auto-start the modules: Apache, MySQL, FileZilla and Mercury
- Extract the WordPress zip-file and copy this folder to ‘htdocs’ in the Xampp installation folder, in my environment C:\xampp\htdocs
- Create a new database user in PHPMyAdmin
http://localhost/phpmyadmin - Run the WordPress installation wizard
http://localhost/wordpress
After all these steps, your new website is up and running. You can also configure some NAT rules in your firewall to publish the website to the Internet. If you need any content from your ‘live’ website, you can copy the content to your ‘offline’ website and test, develop and change your website.