Setting up perfect server config for codeigniter

[eluser]BrianL[/eluser]
Well one obvious solution to this "production environment vastly different than development environment" issue, or "pain in the ass after I think I'm totally done coding" issue is to work directly on your future production server. That way you never run into issues such as production environment not supporting mod rewrite, or not supporting PHP5 and having to rewrite huge swaths of code.

That is, protect your server with HTTP Auth and a self-signed SSL cert, along with a robots.txt so the site doesn't get indexed on Google. When you are ready to "go live" simply remove the HTTP Auth and alter robots.txt and your site is in production mode, with no transition time at all.

Such approach requires care though, a checklist of php directives and CodeIgniter issues to remove before going live. For example, error reporting and scaffolding should be turned off. But this checklist should exist anyway. This is also better if you have full root access so you can alter firewall rules and have additional protection besides HTTP Auth.