Most Flawless Way To Transfer from Dev to Prod [duplicate]

Any difference between dev and prod is bad. Here is what I do:

• Have a different ip for dev server (Whether internal, external, or on local computer is unimportant) — but dev server must be the exact same setup (see bottom paragraph)
• Change the hosts file (see here) (on yours or a testing computer or a virtual machine) to point to dev server ip
• Result: HTTP requests sent to dev server have Host header field set as “example.com” exactly like it will be for the prod server.

This method removes two differences often encountered otherwise:

1. having to change domain name
2. having dev code in a subdirectory, but prod code in root or diff subdirectory. This is because I use git to transfer files between dev and prod.

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The dev server is set up exactly the same as the prod server (see Chef or Puppet for how to programmatically manage servers).