Migrating PHPBB to the new Domain

PHPBB is a forum that is easy to use and powerful. I recently decided to migrate a phpbb forum to a new domain, in order to attract more traffic. Here are the steps I took to successfully migrate all the data.

1. Backup original PHPBB database, this can be done via one of the following methods: (1) login to SSH remotely and issue mysqldump command (2) login to PHPBB control panel and click the database backup in the maintenance section (3) login to your web hosting control panel and click the backup database.

No matter which method you use (for your convenience), at last, the database (e.g. Mysql tables) will be saved/dumped to a file (*.gz or *.sql) in remote server, you will need to download this file to your local drive.

2. Backup original PHPBB files, you can download via FTP (just simply drag files to local directory) or SSH (compress first using e.g. tar etc) and use scp to make a local copy.

3. Upload the PHPBB files to the new domain at the desired location.

4. Upload the PHPBB database, this could be done via (1) upload *.sql or *.tar containing database to new domain and use mysqldump to import data (2) upload the files via phpmysqladmin which is the web browsing GUI for handling mysql databases (other databases are similar, google for alternatives).

5. edit the config.sys at new domain under PHPBB root directory, modify the following using the database login details at new server:

$dbhost = '';
$dbport = '';
$dbname = '';
$dbuser = '';
$dbpasswd = '';

6. Add @define(‘PHPBB_INSTALLED’, true); to the above config.php, if this step is missing, the new forum will be redirected to /install folder every time you visit.

7. Delete the install folder for security purposes.

8. Delete original PHPBB files/folders unless you are 100% sure that your new forum is working.

9. Add index.php in the original domain under PHPbb folder to redirect traffic:

  header("Location: http://CodingForSpeed.com/forum");

10. to Ensure you still have a good SEO score, add .htaccess under your original PHPBB forum folder to add a 301 permanent redirection of your old URL, so old links are still working and will be redirected to the new domain.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !codingforspeed.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://codingforspeed.com/forum/$1 [L,R=301]

11. Change as much as possible your previous hyper links on your website pages to your new domain!

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —