[ic] How do I move a catalog from one system to another?

[Doug Alcorn]

frank.maestas@ttseagle.com writes:

> I've keyed in and configured all my catalog data on a small test
> computer and now need to put it all on the real web server.

My experience with this is that you should install interchange from
scratch on the new server.  Get the 'construct' demo working without a
hitch.  Once you've done that, you know you have a valid and complete
installation of IC.  Then use the new machine's bin/makecat to make a
default/fresh catalog with the name of your production catalog.  Make
sure it works with fresh data.  

Now you're ready to copy up your catalog/config/*, catalog/pages/*,
and catalog/templates/*.  Depending on what you data source is, you
will need to copy your data in.  I usually use mysql.  So to get the
data from the development box, I can just 'mysqldump --add-drop-table
-p tablename > tablename.sql'.  On the production box I can then 'cat
tablename.sql | mysql -p tablename'.  All that's the easy part.

If you've made any changes to the catalog.cfg in development, you need
to look at making the same changes (by hand) to the production box.
In my experience, you can't just copy the catalog.cfg from one box to
another.  This is doubly true for the variables.txt file.  You need to
carefully evaluate what stuff from the development variables to change
in the production variables.  Something I've started doing is not
making all my changes in a file called site.cfg and then #including
that at the bottom of the catalog.cfg.  I'm sure there's a way to do
this with the variables, I'm just not smart enough to figure it out
yet.
-- 
 (__) Doug Alcorn (mailto:doug@lathi.net http://www.lathi.net)
 oo / PGP 02B3 1E26 BCF2 9AAF 93F1  61D7 450C B264 3E63 D543
 |_/  If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're
      free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait.