Welcome to the forums. There are several options. For cloning you can use either Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, or Mac's built in Disk Utility. Most people use the first two options probably because they didn't know Disk Utility could also do it. A longer non-cloning option is to use Time Machine to backup your data and then transfer it to the new hard drive.

As for how to swap the hard drive itself, you can go to ifixit.com. They have great repair manuals: MacBook Pro Repair - iFixit