Pro PHP Security: From Application Security Principles to the Implementation of XSS Defenses, Second Edition

Maintaining Separate Development and Production Environments

The heart of your production environment, then, is simply your production server, which is accessed by the public. You may control this server yourself, or you may share it with other users. A properly maintained production server has the following characteristics:

• Write access to a production server is limited to system administrators, and normally nothing is placed on the server without having been reviewed for appropriateness. This limitation is put into place to facilitate the next characteristic.
• A production server hosts only live applications and finalized content. Unfinished or preliminary versions of applications and data should never be placed on this server, except possibly ...