Synchronizing local and deployed builds

One of the most important (and often difficult) parts of the deployment process is ensuring that the environment an application is being developed, built, and tested within perfectly simulates the environment that application will be deployed into. In this section, you'll learn how to emulate, or virtualize, the environment your deployed application will run within using Vagrant. After demonstrating how this setup can simplify your local development process, we'll use Ansible to provision a remote instance on DigitalOcean.

Developing locally with Vagrant

For a long while, developers would work directly on running servers or cobble together their own version of the production environment locally, often writing ad hoc scripts and tools to smoothen their development process. This is no longer necessary in a world of virtual machines. In this section, we will learn how to use Vagrant to emulate a production environment within your development environment...