Hi John,

I am not sure I understand you completely but what I do on a test server is copy the entire domain over to a test environment. You would need to copy the webroot (including all the custom plugins you have), the Totaradata directory, the Totara database, adjust your config.php for the new environment, Totara has a built in tool for replacing the URL in the database that works very well located at /admin/tool/replace/.

You may want to talk to your web admin when setting this up just in case you have any additional scripts in the user directory that need to be included (wkhtmltopdf comes to mind). Hope that helps.

Peter