New to Yii: How to make a copy of existing website for development

Hi,

I’m new to Yii, have been coding on PHP for 6-7 years now.

I need to make a copy of a currently working website for development. Is it enough to copy the application to my local web-server or there are specific steps that has to be done? Then, I want to upload that dev version to godaddy (where the original is hosted) under the url /website-original/dev. Is that the same as configuring the local copy on my machine?

Thanks for your help.

Is the site you are updating an existing Yii application? If it is, then it shouldn’t be hard to get set up locally. Broadly, the steps I follow are 1) get a db dump from your current site and install locally, 2) install Yii (http://www.yiiframework.com/doc-2.0/guide-start-installation.html), 3) copy over your existing code to your new application (i.e. models/controllers/views, etc.) 4) run composer to update your vendor directory, 5) update appropriate config files. If your existing site is not a Yii application, then you’re looking at a complete rewrite. I would recommend picking up a good book such as Larry Ullmans Yii book to quickly get up to speed on Yii (https://yii.larryullman.com/).

One year ago I was learning PHP and Yii at the same time. I’m still learning both, but things come much easier now. If you’ve been coding for over 6 years, it should be a breeze for you :)

Thanks, for the detailed road-map, I will try it as soon as possible. It is strange I didn’t get a mail notification about your answer - that is why I didn’t see it earlier.

It is an existing Yii app, in production now. All these frameworks are a little confusing to me. Too many files to get things done. It was the same with Codegniter which I tried a couple of years ago. Whatever, sadly I can’t escape Yii as easily ;)