[tcdent]

It might seem minor, but the little things add up. Make your dev environment mirror prod from the start will save you a bunch of headaches. Then, when you're ready to deploy, there is nothing to change.

Even better, stage to a production-like environment early, and then deploy day can be as simple as a DNS record change.

[OccamsMirror]

Thanks to LetsEncrypt DNS-01, you can absolutely spin up a production-like environment with SSL and everything. It's definitely worth doing.