How to Manually Change Domain in Magento

Changing the domain name on a Magento install requires a few steps to update the site URL in mysql. The procedure should be similar to below.

Update your core_config_data table to edit the two records for web/unsecure/base_url and web/secure/base_url

mysql 

mysql> update core_config_data set value = 'http://dev.example.com/' where path = 'web/unsecure/base_url';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0
 
mysql> update core_config_data set value = 'http://dev.example.com/' where path = 'web/secure/base_url';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

After this is done delete the contents of WEBROOT/var/cache. The location of the WEBROOT varies depending on how your server is set up.

cd /home/username/public_html/var/
rm -rf ./cache/*

Update any .htaccess redirects you may have added.

That's it, you're done! Open the site in a new browser tab to make sure that everything loads properly.

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