Actually, this topic is a little out of my depth. But I thought I'd leave a note because I realize that my method is no longer much used. It's a pain in the butt, and I don't use it for my blog because that uses a CMS (Wordpress). But I use it for my little personal sites.

I learned this method when I was going to school. We had a server at school where our projects were deployed. Some guys developed their sites by connecting to the server with FTP and pulling the files down to work on them then pushing them back up to see how the edits played out. That's how the instructor did it. But I wanted to be able work off line.

So I had a local copy of my whole site. Some of the configuration paths were different, so I had all my configuration lines in pairs, with one of the pairs commented out depending on whether it was the local version or the server version. It was extra work for sure, but it meant that I always had a full working version of my site on my local machine.