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Manually fix WordPress siteurl using MySQL

After moving my server from Austin to Grapevine, I ran into what I think might be a bit of a conceptual bug in the way WordPress handles remembering its own site url. The way it works now is WordPress creates a table called wp_options (if you allowed the default naming scheme when setting up your database, otherwise you should probably know what your tables are called) and stores all sorts of configuration options in there. The two columns we are interested in are option_name and option_value. When my entire website except for wordpress was working, I wanted to see what I had set the siteurl to be, because it was probably wrong. To do this, start up the MySQL client and login as root:

$ mysql -u root -p

Enter your root password. Change to the wordpress database with the command:

mysql> use wordpress;

Again, this is if your databases name is actually wordpress. If you don't know what your wordpress database name is, you can use mysql to show all the existing databases with the command:

mysql> show databases;

For example mine looks like this:

mysql> show databases;
+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema |
| mysql              |
| todo               |
| wordpress          |
+--------------------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now that you've selected your wordpress database, we can see what the current value is for our siteurl. (The siteurl is usually something that you configure in /wp-admin but in this case, we can't access any part of the blog because it thinks the site url is something it is not, and therefor cannot connect. herp derp). Run the command:

mysql> select * from wp_options where option_name="siteurl";

You should see something like:

+-----------+---------+-------------+-------------------------+----------+
| option_id | blog_id | option_name | option_value            | autoload |
+-----------+---------+-------------+-------------------------+----------+
|         1 |       0 | siteurl     | http://herpderp/blog    | yes      |
+-----------+---------+-------------+-------------------------+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Where the value http://herpderp/blog is the old/incorrect url of the blog. Now we just need to fix it! Knowing the correct url beforehand, run the command:

mysql> update wp_options set option_value="http://correcturl.com/blog/" where option_name="siteurl";

One thing I want to point out in my own example is that the url includes the /blog/ at the end. This is because that's where my wordpress install is relative to my root directory. In other words, my BLOG is located at http://bitonic.org/blog/ , so the /blog/ is included.

Congratulations! Your site should load at least load now. Close out of your mysql client by pressing Ctrl+D at the prompt, or type 'exit':

mysql> exit
Bye