Override WordPress URL

By  on  

When I migrated my website between Media Temple servers, I wanted to manually test the site to ensure no server configuration differences between the server were bricking the site.  The obvious problem I would encounter is that links would be broken because the site wasn't living on my domain name yet.  I did some research and found a way to easily override the WordPress site and home URLs:

define('WP_HOME', 'http://867.53.0.9');
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://867.53.0.9');

Defining these values within the wp-config.php file allows me to override the database values for the home and site-wide domain settings;  now the site is easily testable before flipping the switch on domain settings!

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Counters

    Counters.  They were a staple of the Geocities / early web scene that many of us "older" developers grew up with;  a feature then, the butt of web jokes now.  CSS has implemented its own type of counter, one more sane and straight-forward than the ole...

  • By
    MooTools, mediaboxAdvanced, and Mexico

    The lightbox is probably one of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0 revolution. No more having to open new windows (which can bog down your computer quite a bit) to see a larger image, video, etc. Instead, the item loads right into the...

Discussion

  1. Once again David, another awesome and super useful article I’ll share with people for sure. Keep up the good work! Let us know if you ever need anything.

    Drew J
    (mt) Media Temple
    @MediaTempleHelp

  2. Jeremiah Megel

    867.53.0.9: Jenny needs to get a valid IP address.

  3. I like this technique:

    if ( file_exists( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/local-config.php' ) ) {
    	define( 'WP_LOCAL_DEV', true );
    	include( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/local-config.php' );
    } else {
    	define( 'WP_LOCAL_DEV', false );
    	define( 'DB_NAME', 'dbname' );
    	define( 'DB_USER', 'dbuser' );
    	define( 'DB_PASSWORD', 'passw0rd' );
    	define( 'DB_HOST', 'localhost' );
    }
    

    Now you make sure local-config.php is in your .gitignore file, and you can git push your WordPress install to your server.

  4. BlaineSch

    Wouldn’t it be easier to edit your host file?

    • Yeah, probably, but most non-tech people would try to avoid that.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!