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Override WordPress URL

By David Walsh on April 9, 2013

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!

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Discussion

Drew at (mt) Media Temple
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

David Walsh
Thank you Drew!

Jeremiah Megel
867.53.0.9: Jenny needs to get a valid IP address.

David Walsh
You win Jeremiah!

redwall_hp

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.

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

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