Archiving entire EE site

Question

I have a client who would like an entire EE site to be archived and delivered to them in it's current state. What would be the appropriate steps to complete this?

Answer 1

Under most conditions, you only need a few things.

1. A complete dump of the database.
2. A complete archive of the EE site's web root.

3. Any important environment configuration files. This would usually include (on linux):

   /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
   /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/my-site.conf
   /etc/php5/php.ini
   

As well as some others. Under the most common setups, you usually just need the first two. It really depends on the setup of the site. Some people host their php agent with Nginx or IIS. For most it's a LAMP stack.

If your client isn't a techie or doesn't have a developer or engineer on staff, you should warn them it might be difficult for them to redeploy the site on their own.

Answer 2

Everything should be in the database, so a copy of that would be good start. You'll also want to backup the files, particularly images and other uploads.

Or do you mean a static (spidered) version? That's not easy, since EE by definition is a dynamic system.