That's what I just did and here are the most valuable command line arguments for doing so:

tar -pcvzf www.tar.gz www/ mysqldump -u root -pPassword --all-databases > alldata.sql tar -pxvzf www.tar.gz mysql -u root -pPassword < alldata.sql

Of course, those commands are not all that I needed to do, but they are the ones that I will want in the future when I move to another web server. So, I guess you could say they're more like a personal note on how to transfer a directory without losing permissions and how to move an entire MySQL install.

Now that I know how to do it, I'm getting fed up with LAMP as a web platform. I much prefer Windows. (What can I say? I'm a Windows guy!) And I recently stumbled into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It makes installing WordPress embarrassingly simple. Just run the installer and it does everything for you. For instance: I made a website in IIS, then ran the installer and it…

• installed PHP,
• installed MySQL,
• installed WordPress,
• and installed a couple other bits and pieces for IIS.

From what I understand, it would have installed IIS if it wasn't already installed. And that's not all it installs either: Joomla, Umbraco, phpBB, DotNetNuke, MS SQL Express, and a lot of others. It's great and, more importantly, it works. With the Web Platform Installer I've gone from barely being able to get WordPress to work on Windows/IIS to stupidly simple installs that take about 5 minutes. Literally! It's great!

# mysqldump -u username -ppassword database_name > FILE.sql

then…

# mysql -u username -ppassword database_name < FILE.sql

This explains how to do it…