Moving a Joomla site to a different directory on the same server

Very often we have customers asking how to move a site installed in a subdirectory into the main web root. This could be the case if you are working on a new version of your site in a subdirectory like test or beta and once done you want to replace the main site with this. In terms of URLs, lets assume for this example that you have a site at http://yourdomain.com and a new version at http://yourdomain.com/tester, and now we want to move the tester directory so that it replaces the site at http://yourdomain.com.

Login to your hosting control panel and click on the "File Manager" icon.
Right click on the tester directory and select Move file.
In the dialog box type in ../. This basically means: "move the directory to its parent folder".
Now if you browse your account's home dir you will see the tester dir next to the public_html folder.
Rename the public_html folder to public_html_old.
Rename the tester folder to public_html. (Same process as above).

Update filesystem paths in configuration.php. You will find this file in public_html. In this file locate the lines where the log_path and tmp_path are set. In this case we simply need to remove the "tester" bit from the path and save the file.

Move directory

Change from:

var $log_path = '/home/sites/yourdomain.com/public_html/tester/logs';
var $tmp_path = '/home/sites/yourdomain.com/public_html/tester/tmp';

To:

var $log_path = '/home/sites/yourdomain.com/public_html/logs';
var $tmp_path = '/home/sites/yourdomain.com/public_html/tmp';