Herself’s Webtools

One problem that shows up when you back up ( mirror ) your Wordpress to your local copy of Wordpress is that Wordpress uses absolute urls rather than relative. So the Wordpress install on your local machine may point to entries and stuff at the live site. To fix this you need to change the base url. If you try to change it using the wp-admin tools on your local machine it points to your live site which you do not want to change.

All the directions I read have you break your live site, copy files, then fix your live site. That’s living a bit too dangerously for me. This just requires you log onto my sql and change the default base url.

To fix this log onto mysql ( mysql -u your_username -p )

Once you are logged in type:

select option_value from wp_options where option_name = ’siteurl’;

*Use siteurl literally not your actual siteurl.

It will show you where the local Wordpress install thinks it is located.

To change this to your local machine type

update wp_options set option_value = ‘http://127.0.0.1/wordpressDirectory’ where option_name = ’siteurl’;

wordpressDirectory should be the local directory you installed your Wordpress copy into. To be sure this is correct just retype the select option_value from wp_options where option_name = ’siteurl’;