”Restoring Mysql database of your website ” [ Joomla ] via Cpanel

In case you are using joomla for your website and you are managing it using WHM/Cpanel, for you to restore your database of your site, you may follow the steps mentioned below.

First make sure that you have the backup of the database intact, a file with the extension .sql something similar to “your_database_backup.sql”

Note : Kindly note down the Database name , Username and password that you are going to create in the following steps which is very important.

  1. Open your cPanel dashboard, open My Sql Databases under Databases.
  2. Under create a new database, type in the name of your database in the space provided and CLICK on Create Database.

Note: In Cpanel the prefix will be set automatically. You just need to type in the name of the database. ie something like “yourdomain_thedatabasename”.

  1. Under Add a new user type in the username that you require.
  2. You may add a password for the user that you are creating, its always advised that you maintain a strong password. Then CLICK on Create a new User.
  3. Under Add a user to a database, select new user that we just created from the drop down and the new database and click on Add.
  4. That will take you to another page manage user privileges, select All Privileges and then CLICK on Make changes.

                             Thus you have created a database so that you may restore “your_database_backup.sql” for that Login to your server as root user through command line, and follow these steps.

  1. Change your directory to where “your_database_backup.sql” lies.
  2. Then execute the following command, mysql yourdomain_thedatabasename < your_database_backup.sql

Note : In the above command “yourdomain_thedatabasename” refers to the new database that you created using cPanel. Thus by executing the above command the backup file “your_database_backup.sql” is restored to the new database.

Now we need to make changes to the configuration.php file of joomla to update the changes we made. You can find the configuration.php file under /home/youraccount/public_html/configuration.php.

Open configuration.php and make the following changes,

                 public $user = ‘yourdomain_newuser’;

                 public $password = ‘newpassword’;

                 public $db = ‘yourdomain_thedatabasename’;

Thats pretty much it. The site must load fine. Sometimes you may get a common issue with joomla “Error displaying the error page: Application Instantiation Error” . This may be due to the following reasons

1. Mismatch between th entries in configuration.ini file and the actual values in terms of

   $user , $password , $db. Confirm the values again.

2. Database issues, which can be dealt by repairing the database from the cPanel.

3. Or sometimes the value “ public $dbtype = ‘mysqli’ “ in configuration.ini, try changing

   the value to “ public $dbtype = ‘mysql’ “ .

This should fix most of the cases that shows “Application Instantiation error”