Changing domain names for WPMU and lighttpd

Ouch! I let one of my domain names expire on Tuesday and BAM someone pounced on it. Not normally a big deal unless it’s worth something, this one was. It wasn’t that it was valuable monetarily, however it was the primary domain I used for my Wordpress MU site. I suddenly found myself with a half working website, not good. Took me an hour or so to piece everything back together so I thought I’d share it.

1. Stop lighttpd
2. I had to change my DNS records at my provider and update with a new domain to take over for the lost one .
3. Modified /var/www/wp-config.php variable DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE with the new domain
4. Modified /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and replaced the old $HTTP["host"] entry
5. Unfortunately WP sticks the domain name of your primary site EVERYWHERE in the database which was a real bummer.  After I had found it in more than a few places I decided I’d better dump the database, replace using vi and then import the database back.
6. mysqldump -u username -p wp_databasename > databasename.sql
7. I then used vi to do a global replace of the old domain with the new
8. I then dropped the old database and recreated it with the same name.
9. Importing the database is easy with mysql -u username -p wp_databasename < databasename.sql
10. Restart lighttpd

I think that’s it.  It seems to be working again and hopefully this will help someone out of a jam in the future.

Word of caution:  I’d do a backup of everything before I starting and I also can’t promise that this will work if some WP plugin is doing anything strange with the domain name.  Good Luck.

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