Question

I’m deploying a WordPress blog, but I don’t want to overwrite the current site yet.

public_html/. <– the current site

public_html/wp/. <– the new site

How must my .htaccess look like so I can seamlessly switch from the current site to the new one
so that http://domain.tld shows the new site like it would be directly in the public_html folder

Answer 1

I don’t know whether it applies to your situation, but wouldn’t it be simpler to just do a series of move operations in your FTP client?

1. Create directory /public_html/old/
2. Move everything except for /public_html/wp into /public_html/old
3. Move everything from /public_html/wp up one level

done!

You’d have to be very careful when doing the moving of course.

If that won’t work, I don’t know what kind of hosting environment you are in, but the easiest way to do would be to map your domain to public_html/wp instead of public_html. That can’t be done in .htaccess though, you will need some kind of access to the site’s setup.

In .htaccess, you will probably have to use a mod_rewrite rule that could look something like this (I can’t test this right now so no guarantees.)

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp
RewriteRule (.*) /wp/$1?%{QUERY_STRING}