00:00: Today we're going to take a look at how to create a staging site on Scout. This can be useful if you want to create a working copy of your existing live website. 00:09: We first start by visiting cloudabove.com and logging in, then we open up our Scout control panel and see our sites listed like this. 00:17: In this demo I have a working website at poldice.com and I want to create a copy of it into a Staging area. 00:23: I first need to create the new clean area where the staging site will be held, so to do this we click on "Add a Site" in the top right corner. 00:31: We then see the New Site Wizard, we need to pick a URL which the Staging site will use 00:37: The fastest approach is to select the "Temporary Domain" option, Scout will get you up and running with a real sub-domain and working DNS straight away. This helps to make life easier, as no one likes to wrestle with DNS when we could be sipping coffee. 00:51: Next up, Scout asks what type of Web App we will be running in the staging area, mine is WordPress so I will select that. 00:58: The next option appears and we can just leave it on its default choice of "No Thanks". 01:03: We then select the server we wish this staging site to live on. 01:07: Then we set a nickname or username of our choosing 01:10: and click on "Create Site". 01:13: Scout presents us with the usual page after creating a new site, it shows us important credentials which can be used to manage the site in future. These passwords can always be easily reset through Scout after the fact, so it isn't crucial to save them now if you don't want to. 01:28: Got it! Lets go! 01:31: We're taken to the Overview page for our new Staging site, we can see its address at the top, that's great but currently it is an empty site, how do we clone our live website into this new one? 01:42: Lets start by finding the site we wish to clone, click on Sites from the left. 01:47: OK, this is the one I wanted to clone, so I will click on the Settings cog on the right-hand side. 01:53: On the site overview page you will see a Tools menu in the top right. 01:57: Click on that to show various options. The one we need is, "Clone Site". 02:02: We are then presented with this Clone screen. 02:05: We simply have one choice to make, that is, to select the destination of where we would like this clone of the website to go. So in the drop-down box I select our recently created Staging site which I know is empty at the moment. Please make this selection with care because it will overwrite the contents of whichever website you select. 02:23: This is a nice feature and we can leave the toggle on. If we think about it, we are going to be copying one website from one web address or URL to a different one, but in the website's database it will still be set to the old address, this is where Scout steps in and helps us. It performs a search and replace across the database, replacing all instances of the old URL with the new one on the staging site, this is crucial and Scout saves us time and effort here. 02:49: Click on the clone button. 02:52: Scout shows us a banner explaining that the Site clone is underway, this is performed as a background job and you're still free to use the Scout control panel as you please in the meantime. 03:02: Once the clone is complete, a pop-up notification will show in the bottom right corner of your screen. 03:08: That's it! You've just created a new staging area and cloned your website to it. You now have two independent copies of the same website. In the future you may find yourself wanting to clone back the contents of the staging site to the live site, so we will cover that in another video. The Scout platform was handcrafted with love by our devoted cloud above team in Cornwall. If you have feedback or ideas for Scout then we would love to hear from you.