As an established practice that has stood the test of time, it is often recommended that you have three environments in your workflow a web designer or developer: production, staging, and development.
When starting a new project (or feature) you should begin your work on a development environment.
This local site will look and act like the live site, commonly referred to as a sandbox, and it is only visible to you.
You can create, tweak, and code as much and however you like, until you feel the product is a good representation of what you envisioned.
Once you are OK with it, you can push to your live, production environment.
At this time, we will be showing you how to create a staging area for your Softaculous installations.
A staging environment is a part of a workflow in most development projects and the deployment process and it is a copy of your production environment (your current live website) on a private server.
This is a safe place that will allow you to test any changes - major or minor - that you plan on implementing in a secure environment, preventing any unexpected errors on your live website.
It is often recommended that you pair this feature with version control (such as git) or GitHub or GitLab web-based hosting services for version control using Git which allows for collaboration, storing versions, and restoring previous versions among other benefits.
This guide using WordPress as an example will help you how to Create Staging for your Softaculous installations.
Go to your panel (e.g. cPanel's URL will be https://domain_name.com:2083) and log in with your details.
There click on the Softaculous Icon or Link.
The Softaculous Enduser Panel will be displayed.
Go to all installations page.
Choose the installation you want to create Staging.
Click on the Create Staging icon you wish to create staging.
The create Staging page will appear with the current installation details and a form to fill in the details.
Fill in the Staging Installation Details.
Fill in the staging installation details i.e. Choose domain, Directory, Database name, etc
Click on the Create Staging button and this should do the trick. Please be patient as the time varies as this is determined by the size of your installation.
That's it !!
You can now use this staging installation to test the updates or any other changes you may want to test.
You will receive the staging installation details via email (if the emails are enabled).
NOTE: The admin/user account login details will be the same as the source installation.
