Softaculous Staging Environment

The staging feature is an essential requirement in today’s era as it will assist in making modifications to a production website without impacting the actual customers.

Softaculous has simplified this process and recently introduced the staging feature. This provides an exact replica of your live website where you can make modifications and/or alter the theme without affecting the live website. Once you have made the necessary changes using the staging feature, it is easy to push the updated website to the production environment.

The main concept behind this is to create a duplicate of the website in order to make alterations without impacting the live site. The Softaculous software allows you to maintain both the Staging and live website simultaneously. WebHostingPeople offers the Softaculous App Installer software in our Standard hosting plan. For more information, please visit our website here – https://www.webhostingpeople.net/webhosting/

Create a Staging Environment using Softaculous

Now, we will go through the steps to create a staging environment of a live website and republish it after making the necessary changes.

1) Access the “Softaculous App Installer” interface by clicking its icon on your hosting cPanel control panel home page.

2) Once there, click on the box icon from the top tab to navigate to the active script installation directory.

3) Click on the “Create Staging” icon next to the installation for which you want to create the staging environment as shown in the screenshot below.

4) Now, the staging creation page will appear, which should display installation details and a form to fill out the information about the staging copy (domain name, directory, database). Fill out the form and click on the “Create Staging” button at the bottom to initiate the process.

Once done, it will provide the new management URL and login details same as the live website. You can log in to the staging website to make the necessary alterations. If everything works fine after modifying the site, we can publish the changes to the live site by following the steps below.

5) To push the changes to the production website, click on the “Push to Live” button next to the staging installation as shown in the screenshot below.

6) In the new interface, you will see two options there: “Default” and “Customize”. Both of them will create a backup of the current installation before pushing the changes. In Customize, you can choose the modifications that you want to push to the live installation. Click on the ‘Push to Live’ button at the bottom to push the staging website to production.

Once done, a success message will appear with the live website URL and its administration dashboard URL as shown below. You can now check the live website to confirm that everything appears as expected there.

Please contact our support department or comment down in the comment section if you are facing any issue. We will get help directly from webhostingpeople support staff.