Reply To: How to tar a site

Hi All,

There’s two reasons why you might want to tar a site; one is to re-create a problem and the other is to archive.

If you want to re-create a problem then you probably want everything including the database.  In that case make sure that the tar file includes the exec directory where all the runtime files are located.

If you want to archive a site then don’t include the runtime files (database and logs).  When you make the tar just don’t inlcude the exec directory.

Each of us develops preferences when we do tasks like this.  My personal preference, when I make site tar’s, is to navigate into the site directory and tar exactly those files and directories that I want without the relative paths.  That way I can move the tar file into any empty site (i.e. the site name doesn’t matter) and unload the tar and I can give it to someone else and they don’t have to worry about the name of the site where they unload it.

I also wrote a script to do this automatically so that I could archive a version of my sites automatically.