Setting up a staging environment for your application

If you want to create a new design for your website, you do not want everyone to see it right away. After all, errors can still occur and it is not professional to show a website under construction. Even if you want to expand your website with new features, it is not smart to do this immediately in production. There is a high chance that something will break. Therefore, it is better to use the so-called staging feature. A new installation will then be created in a separate folder on your domain name. There you can start building, until it is finished. With a few mouse clicks, you can switch the website to your domain name, without having to move databases and files.

Why a staging environment?

A staging environment is a new installation in which you can preview changes to your website before applying them to your production website. This way you can prevent downtime or features that no longer work. Thanks to the staging feature, it is therefore possible to create a kind of preview for yourself, without visitors seeing it.

The advantage of a staging environment is that you can test new WordPress themes, plugins or pages, for example. You can fully configure these before making the changes live. For this example we use a WordPress staging installation.

WordPress staging installation

In this article we use WordPress as a starting point. If you have installed another app, this works the same.

To be able to create a staging installation, you must already have a WordPress installation. You can install WordPress in a few steps via our control panel. See this article on how to easily install WordPress.

We will explain how to create a WordPress staging installation from an existing installation. To do this, you need to access DirectAdmin and install a website via Softaculous, which you can find as part of DirectAdmin. See this article to log into DirectAdmin.

After logging into DirectAdmin. Click on "Extra Features" and then "Softaculous Auto Installer".

 

You are now in Softaculous. Click on ‘Installations’ to see your current installations. In this overview, choose the first option under ‘Options’: ‘Create staging’.

Fill in the required details. For example, on which domain name you want to install the staging installation. In our case, that is your-domain. We install the installation in the ‘wp’ folder. We do not change the database name. Optionally, it is possible to immediately disable search engine visibility upon installation. Then click on ‘Create Staging’.

Now your staging website is ready. You can log into the staging environment (for example your-domain.com/staging/) and immediately start making adjustments. You will receive the login details after the staging installation is completed. It is now possible to make adjustments, such as installing plugins and themes, updating to a new WordPress version or creating or modifying pages.

When your new website is completely finished, you can make it live, without having to start an FTP program. The migration can be fully executed by our system. Go to the same overview page in Softaculous and click on ‘push the installation to live’.

Make from your current

site, make a quick backup of your database and files, because all data will be overwritten. This applies to both your files and your database. Keep this in mind before you click on ‘Push To Live’.

Please be patient for a few minutes, the website is now being migrated to your domain name. You will receive a notification as soon as the installation is complete. After that, you can visit your website.