Ask HN: Your development/deployment workflow

What do you do for web app/site deployment solution? Do you pull from a git repo, or use some less elegant version control? Do you test locally, or maintain a /dev/ folder on your remote machine? Just curious on what other hackers think the ideal setup is.

  • I develop in a virtual machine that mimics my production server(s). This reduces the amount of deployment surprises when pushing to staging. I use 1 dev vm per project.

    For version control I use git. For git hosting i use github.

    Absolutely test locally, and then test in staging and production. All three of the environments are similar.

    For editing i use vim.

    My setup is not a silver bullet, someone could be using a completely different setup (dev server, emacs, hg) and be just as fast as me. It's not really the tools that make my setup so great, it's the ideas behind them.