For many nopCommerce developers, part of the deployment life cycle is the migration of their customized nopCommerce instance from their local development environment to their “live” hosting environment. That segment of the software life cycle can vary greatly according to environment; today, we’ll cover how to migrate a development copy of nopCommerce to your Arvixe hosting account.

First of all, we’re going to go with certain pre-requisites; the first pre-requisite is that you’re using SQL Server for your database, and the second is that you’re using Visual Studio as your development environment. If you’re not using Visual Studio, there will be some differences, based on your localhost setup, but that’s outside the scope of today’s article.

Once you’ve used Visual Studio to get your local nopCommerce instance the way you want it to look and feel for deployment, it’s time to get your “deployable” package together. Follow the direction on http://www.nopcommerce.com/docs/79/installing-nopcommerce.aspx, where it says ” Getting the deployable package from a package with source code”.

Once you have a deployable fileset, it’s time to collect your local version of the nopCommerce database, where all your settings and content information are stored. Open SQL Server Management Studio, and navigate to your nopCommerce database. Right-click on the database, and select “Tasks”>”Backup…”; determine where you’re going to create your backup, and click “OK” to start.

Now it’s time to dig out your e-mail you received when you set up your Arvixe account, with the setup details for your control panel, and FTP access. Use an application like Filezilla to upload your files to your Arvixe account; it’ll be easier if you upload your database to the “data” folder, so that you can find it more easily. You’ll be uploading your site files to the wwwroot folder.

Once your site files are uploaded, make sure that the Network user has write access to the “App_Data”, “bin”, “content” and “plugin” folders.   Now, you’ll want to go into the “Databases” section of your control panel, create an empty MSSQL database, and then restore your uploaded backup file to the empty database. In your App_Data/settings.txt file, make sure your connection string information is correct for your hosting environment.

Now that all that is done, navigate to your hosting account’s domain URL that you used to set up the account. If you’ve already pointed your DNS servers properly, everything should be good to go.

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Looking for quality nopCommerce Hosting? Look no further than Arvixe Web Hosting!