what is the pre and post procedure if we do a VM clone of production bitbucket server for Dev setup

Question

Hi,

I have a requirement to setup a production clone environment of bitbucket server ver. 5.5 with SQL server database.

I am thinking of creating a clone of production vm. What are the steps to following once we restore the clone VM. I am new to Bitbucket server administration on Windows server 2012. Need your help.

Caterina Curti · Answer

Hi @Girish Shenoy,

The instructions by @Daniel Wester are great (thanks Daniel)!

We also have a page covering this topic and providing links to the official documentation pages for the various steps:

- How to establish staging server environments for Bitbucket Server

The page also provides instructions on what needs to be updated / disabled on the staging environment to avoid impacts on the production server. Note that the list may not be complete depending on the specifics of your installation.

Cheers,

Caterina - Atlassian

Daniel Wester · Answer

Not sure how your set up is, but the basic gist of the clone should be:

* Shutdown Bitbucket Server
* Copy the production database to the new development database
* Copy the bitbucket home directory to the new development home directory
* Update any config files in the development instance application server to point to the new development database
* Bring up the production server
* Bring up the development server
* Disable mail on the development server.
* Update the base url etc of the development server.
* Update any application links in the development server
* Update the license keys in the development server to be the developer licenses

1-4 could be done through cloning the vm (if the database is running locally). I would recommend though having a firewall on the development server so that it can't make any automated external calls (it gets confusing for end users when they get emails from the dev server by accident).

I've seen other folks making sure to change the name of the staging server to be "NOT PRODUCTION: name of service". Highly recommend doing something similar.