This is the shortest post in the series, and maybe that’s the point.
Everything described in the preceding posts — cleaning the repository, preparing the SQL dump, understanding the child theme — was building towards this moment: can we take a fresh WordPress installation and reproduce the site from just the files in the repository?
The answer is yes, and here’s what it actually takes.
The steps
Create a new site in LocalWP — use any credentials, any settings, just get a blank WordPress install running.
Copy the child theme from the repository into the LocalWP themes directory.
Copy the uploads folder from the repository into the LocalWP uploads directory.
Drop the default WordPress database, import
caleb-local.sqlVisit
http://caleb-local.local
That’s it.
What happens
The database import sets the active theme to the child theme, sets the site URL to the local address, and brings in all the content — pages, navigation menus, settings, everything. There is no step where you log into WordPress admin and configure anything. The site arrives ready.
Why this matters
A site you can rebuild from scratch in five minutes is a fundamentally different thing from a site you can’t. It means:
- Local development is possible — make changes locally, test them, then apply them to the live site.
- The files in the repository are the actual source of truth, not a backup of a backup.
- Moving to a different host, or recovering from something going wrong, is a known process rather than a crisis.
Most WordPress sites don’t work this way.
Most WordPress sites live on a server, and that’s where all the real information is — in the database, in uploaded files, in server configuration. The repository, if there is one, is a partial record at best.
Getting to the point where the repository is the site took longer than the original build. That’s probably the right trade-off.
Part of a series — back to the overview
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