Open Your Magento Store on a Temporary URL

What is a temporary URL?

A URL is a web address. A temporary URL is a short-term address you can use before your domain is ready. It is like visiting a new shop through a side door while the front sign is still being painted.

Magento saves its own address inside its database. This is called the base URL. If the base URL is your real domain, the store will not open on a temporary address. It will send you to the real domain. So you must change the base URL for a while.

Steps

1. Find your temporary address. It is usually in your welcome email. If it is not there, ask Hostvento support.
2. Log in to the client area and open your hosting control panel.
3. Open phpMyAdmin. This is a tool to view and edit databases.
4. Click your Magento database on the left.
5. Open the table named core_config_data. It may have a prefix before the name.
6. Click Search and look for the path web/unsecure/base_url.
7. Click Edit on that row. Change the value to your temporary address. End it with a slash.
8. Do the same for the path web/secure/base_url.
9. Save each change.
10. Open File Manager. Delete the files inside the cache folders. In Magento 1 these are var/cache. In Magento 2 they are var/cache, var/page_cache and generated.
11. Visit the temporary address in your browser. Your store should load.

Another way: the hosts file

You can also edit the hosts file on your own computer. It is a small list that tells your computer where a domain lives. Add a line with your server number and your domain. Then your computer shows the store at the real domain, while everyone else still sees the old site. Ask Hostvento support for the server number.

Quick recap

• Magento saves a base URL and redirects to it.
• Back up the database first.
• Change web/unsecure/base_url and web/secure/base_url in core_config_data.
• Clear the cache folders.
• Change the values back when your domain is live.