Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion® Applications

Deployment

For every development project, a best-case scenario exists for development environments. That scenario is to have separate and identical server environments for development, testing, staging, and production.

In practice, it is the rare client who is willing to provide four separate and equivalent duplications of the server environment. Consequently, it is quite common to set up individual environments for development, testing, and sometimes staging on one server, and production on another. Production servers should never be used for development, testing, or staging.

If development, testing, and staging areas are to be configured on the same box, then separate directory structures should exist for each, as well as separate databases. ...