: Whats the best way to create/handle a dev server? As I expand on different website changes I'm trying to find a better and safer alternative to my current testing.domain.com and FTP solution.

@Hamm4606531

I have development server on my notebook, there is git repository too. The configuration is quite similar to production server. If I need synchronize, I just upload all source files.

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@Pierce454

You'll probably want to branch your code or at the very least start using tags. I prefer the branch method so I can keep 2 copies of the site. One being my trunk version ( dev ) and another being the live production copy. Then I can just merge the changes to the production branch when I'm ready to publish and if something goes wrong on production I have a current 1 for 1 match with production I can work on to fix.

As for the dev server part. I often use a subdomain of "QA.example.com" and restrict all access by IP to it. This way if I need a 3rd party to see it to proof something before it goes live, I can add their IP range.

Since you're using a database with your PHP site ( I'm assuming this since you mentioned it's dynamic ), you might also want to make a copy of the database and rename it with a suffix like 'dev' so that you can edit it without effecting production in your QA environment. It's fairly easy to export a DB and just insert it into another with a different name if you're doing it from scratch each time. I actually have a script through Hudson that allows me to do a simple backup from my production DB and then drop my QA DB and replace with the production copy.

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