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
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools, Mario, and Portal

    I'm a big fan of video games. I don't get much time to play them but I'll put down the MacBook Pro long enough to get a few games in. One of my favorites is Portal. For those who don't know, what's...

  • By
    CSS Ellipsis Beginning of String

    I was incredibly happy when CSS text-overflow: ellipsis (married with fixed width and overflow: hidden was introduced to the CSS spec and browsers; the feature allowed us to stop trying to marry JavaScript width calculation with string width calculation and truncation.  CSS ellipsis was also very friendly to...

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!