In case you are using Joomla for your website and you are managing it using WHM/Cpanel, for you to restore the 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 are very important.
- Open your cPanel dashboard, and open My Sql Databases under Databases.
- 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”.
- Under Add a new user type in the username that you require.
- You may add a password for the user that you are creating, it’s always advised that you maintain a strong password. Then CLICK on Create a new User.
- Under Add a user to a database, select the new user that we just created from the drop-down and the new database and click on Add.
- 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 the command line, and follow these steps.
- Change your directory to where “your_database_backup.sql” lies.
- 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’;
next,
public $db = ‘yourdomain_thedatabasename’;
That’s 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 the entries in the configuration.ini file and the actual values in terms of
$user , $password , $db. Confirm the values again.
2. Database issues, which can be dealt with 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 show an “Application Instantiation error”
