If you've only worked on a localhost then you don't need to save the database since it's probably all dummy data. Custom themes and plugins will need to be re-activated once you go live though.

no , i wan to save my database !

Read this then: http://learn.elgg.org/en/1.10/admin/duplicate-installation.html

@cIM

The last step is not clear. How do we do this via phpmyadmin

Change the filestore data directory

UPDATE elgg_metastrings SET string = '/var/data/elgg_test/'
WHERE id = (
SELECT value_id
FROM elgg_metadata
WHERE name_id = (
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT id
FROM elgg_metastrings
WHERE string = 'filestore::dir_root'
) as ms2
)
LIMIT 1
);

That's an SQL query, you'd copy and paste that into the SQL textarea in phpmyadmin and need to change the first line where your data folder is going to be. Use only absolute path.

The way I do it is just click your database, click search on the top menu, type in localhost in the first box, click select all, then click go. I would only change localhost entries in the elgg_datalists table or other tables if need to be. Also uses absolute path.

Pasting in SQL textarea seemed not to work for me. If you have screenshots of this step please post. Thanks

Try my way then. Second paragraph.