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cPanel Website Transfer – Part 1 – Changing an Add-on Domain to a Primary Domain

Tags: cPaneljoomlaLinuxmagentomigrationrestoretransferwebsitewordpress

Scenario:

A common requirement arises in cPanel migration service is to transfer an add-on domain to a primary domain, we are trying to provide the steps to do this,

Converting an Add-on Domain to a Primary Domain

Skill Level : Beginner

In this post, I will explain how to convert an add-on domain to a primary domain. Considering a complex case, lets consider the primary domain should be a different one from the one that holds the Add-on domain.

Pre Requisites

Server Platform : Linux

User requires     : cPanel and SSH access (root)

This is a Site transfer. Also both the sites I’ve mentioned here is on same server.

Case

The Add-on Domain under a website has to be converted as its Primary Domain. If you have a Full backup, its another case. I’ll explain it in another post.

Solution

Lets consider the Add-on Domain is addon.com under the user admin and the document root of the add-on domain is :

/home/admin/public_html/addon

Now it should be transferred as the Primary Domain

* Using WHM Create a New account primary.com, the document root is then say /home/primary
We’ve to transfer the whole data from /home/admin/public_html/addon.com to /home/primary/public_html first.

* The Steps will be :

root@server [/home/admin/public_html/addon]# cp -r ./* /home/primary/public_html

This will recursively copy everything inside the PWD to the specified location

Don’t forget to copy .htaccess too

root@server [/home/admin/public_html/addon]# cp .htaccess /home/primary/public_html

* Thats it, the contents are moved, but there is a database too which has to be moved eventually.
* I’ll site some type of websites like CMS and Blog :

For a Magento website, the database configuration is specified inside the local.xml file which is placed inside the /app/etc directory inside a domain. For example

root@server [/home/admin/public_html/addon]# cd /app/etc
root@server [/home/admin/public_html/addon/app/etc]# cat local.xml

* Watch for these lines in the local.xml file

<username><![CDATA[admin_user]]></username>
<password><![CDATA[password]]></password>
<dbname><![CDATA[admin_db]]></dbname>

< ![CDATA[admin_user]]>