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I am creating an e-commerce website using OpenCart and hostgator for hosting. I want to create a development environment with OpenCart installed on it so that I can view changes and edits without making them live. I also want an easy way to be able to save changes and push them to the live website.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thank you.

user889115
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  • Do you have any sort of infrastructure yet? BTW, since OpenCart is a simply PHP app, there's nothing that makes a development environment for it different from any other PHP app. – deceze Aug 11 '11 at 03:04
  • I do not yet have any infrastructure - and thank you for the clarification. I will now have a much broader search. – user889115 Aug 11 '11 at 15:19

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If you are the only developer and tester of the site, then simply install WAMP (Windows), MAMP (MacOS), or XAMPP on your development machine. You will then be able to install OpenCart, edit any files, and perform testing using a browser and going to http://localhost/

If there are a number of developers, or you need the development environment to be accessible to other people in other locations, simply setup a subdomain under your existing domain (like "dev.server.com" where the production site is "server.com") and install it there. (If you go this route, I would suggest researching HTACCESS rules to limit access to the development environment to yourself and other authorised people, rather than making it completely public.)

Luke Stevenson
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  • Perfect - exactly what I wanted! Do you have any ideas how I can push any changes I make on this development machine - from XAMPP or MAMP - to the live site? @Lucanos – user889115 Aug 11 '11 at 15:19
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    @user889115: You simply access your production server through FTP and copy across the files as they are developed and tested. (Be careful of writing over your configuration files, as they will be different between your development server and the production server.) For database changes, you just export the database from your local server, make replacements where needed, and import that into the production server through phpMyAdmin or similar. – Luke Stevenson Aug 13 '11 at 15:01