How to rename the installation directory of Joomla via FTP

Locate the Joomla Instance

Access the installation directory of your Joomla website. For example, if you access your website via the following link:

http://www.example.com/

where example.com is the actual domain that you are using on your website, it means that Joomla installation is located directly within the public_html/ directory of your account. However, if you access your website via the following link:

http://www.example.com/joomla30/

where example.com is your domain name and “joomla30” is a subfolder on your account, this means that Joomla installation is located in a folder, called “joomla30” within the public_html directory of your account.

Rename the Directory

In our example, we have installed a Joomla website, using a subfolder called “joomla”, which means that it is accessible via the following link:

http://www.example.com/joomla/

When you locate the folder of your Joomla installation, right-click on it and choose Rename option. Note that this may differ between the different FTP clients, so it is best to check the official documentation of the client that you are using for more details on that.

Enter the name of the new subfolder that you will be using for your Joomla installation and save it. In our example, we have renamed the folder from “joomla” to “joomla-new”.

Edit the Configuration File

The last step of the process is to update the settings from within the main configuration file of your Joomla installation. This step is very important because it will insure that all of the functionality of your website is intact and unaffected by the change of the subfolder.

When you locate the configuration file, download it on your personal computer. From there, you can edit it with a simple text editor, such as Notepad. You must avoid rich-text editors, such as Word.

When you open the configuration file of your Joomla website for editing, the lines of code that you actually need to change are:

     public $log_path = ‘/home/example/public_html/joomla/logs’;
     public $tmp_path = ‘/home/example/public_html/joomla/tmp’;

where “example” is your cPanel username and “joomla” is the subfolder of your Joomla website. What you need to do is to change the “joomla” directory to the new name that you entered in Step 1 of this tutorial. In our example, we have renamed the directory to “joomla-new” so we have changed that accordingly.

Once you make the changes, simply save the file as configuration.php and upload it back to the server.

This will update the configuration of your Joomla website and you will be able to access it via the new folder.