Clone Magento from Production to your Local Machine

Eliminate all the vague problems you encounter when cloning your magento environment.

This guide should eliminate all the vague problems you would otherwise encounter when trying to clone your magento environment.

Problems we’ll tackle

Couldn’t log into the admin section
Couldn’t replace the empty database with the full production data

Install MAMP

There are a gazillion guides on how to do this.

Download magento

Download the version of magento you want to install.
Paste the folder inside the directory that MAMP points at (check MAMP settings)

Go to app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php and comment out these lines

if (!$cookieParams['httponly']) {
  unset($cookieParams['httponly']);
  if (!$cookieParams['secure']) {
    unset($cookieParams['secure']);
    if (!$cookieParams['domain']) {
      unset($cookieParams['domain']);
    }
  }
}

if (isset($cookieParams['domain'])) {
  $cookieParams['domain'] = $cookie->getDomain();
}

You’ll find these lines between line 80-120. This prevents cookie related problems for admin login