Creating a Development site with 5.2.2

[twistsol]

I upgraded our site to 5.2.2 over the weekend and last night was about to do my normal Monday evening refresh to our development site. I followed the following steps which I've done many times in VB3 and VB4 but had a mess this time.

1. Turned off the site in AdminCP
2. Via SSH exported the database to a file
3. Changed the URLs on the Site Name / URL / Contact Details page of AdminCP to devel.sawdustzone.com and saved.
4. Via SSH exported the database to a file with the updated URLs
5. Tried to change the URL's back to the production values and this is where it got exciting. It kept asking me to log in and it kept giving me an error about a redirect whitelist and would not log me in and pointed me back to the login for the development site.

To fix it I uploaded tools.php and the install directory and kept getting the following error "2: mysqli_real_connect(): (28000/1045): Access denied for user '???????''@'localhost' (using password: NO) ". The ??????? were actually the name of another admin. so it doesn't look like tools was reading the config.php since that is not our database username.

I ended up restoring from the backup taken in step two to get the site back online but this meant three hours of downtime vs. the normal 15 minutes.

Finally, to my questions.

1. Would adding our development site name to the whitelist have saved me from this?
2. What are the exact steps so this never happens again or what did I do wrong.

This made for a really un-fun evening

[Wayne Luke]

You need to update the /core/includes/config.php file to point to your new database configuration.