[eluser]Eric Barnes[/eluser]
Well the simplest way would be to dump the production db and run it locally so you can develop off an exact copy. Which at a minimum is ideally what you always want to do. You really should never develop directly against production.
What I personally do which may be out of scope for what you are trying to do is set a constant in the index file which I then use to load the correct db for the environment. Something like define('ENVIRONMENT', 'local'); then in the db config check if it is local or production and then load the correct group.