Contao: How to create a virtual system from your live website

Since a couple of year my sport club runs its website with contao.

Because our webhoster changed the support for php, i have to find a way to do an upgrade without damaging the running website.

The plan:

1. create a linux host as a vm
2. install mysql, apache2, php
3. import the backups

The first step was easy. Inside virtualbox i created an ubuntu 17.10 system.
The second step was not that simple:

add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
apt install mysql-server apache2 php5.6 php5.6-mysql

Importing the data into the database was easy (Before i did a backup via the contao frontend: system -> backup database).

mysql -u root -pYOURPASS -e "create database mydb"
mysql -u root -pYOURPASS mydb < database.backup.sql

From the live system i copied everything into /var/www/html and changed the user to www-data:

cd /var/www/html
chown -R www-data *

Last step is the customizing of /var/www/html/system/config/localconfig.php

$GLOBALS['TL_CONFIG']['dbHost'] = 'localhost';
$GLOBALS['TL_CONFIG']['dbUser'] = 'root';
$GLOBALS['TL_CONFIG']['dbPass'] = 'YOURPASS';
$GLOBALS['TL_CONFIG']['dbDatabase'] = 'mydb';

And after a last command

systemctl restart apache2

i was able to open the website via a local firefox with http://localhost/index.php.
Now a snapshot a damaged installation after an upgrade can be rolled back without any problem ;-)