How to minimise differences between a development and production server?

Lots of time, We build a web application in our own personal system, with a local server that comes in packages like WAMP, XAMPP. But, the configuration we have on our system hardly matches 100% with the server where we host that application. This adds up to the debugging complexity a lot. Specially when the server you host is configured to hide the errors. Relying on error logs to debug everything, is a uncomfortable options, which is also not guaranteed to be available.

What are th开发者_开发知识库e measures we can take to minimise such differences?

You guys might say, it depends on web server as the configuration might be different from server to server. Even in this case, or shared hosting, I would like to know of the pointers to take, before hosting a application or even start building it.

---

We use a staging server that is a clone of our deployment server. Running code by the staging server (using version control) is both fast and a reliable way to ensure that the new code/code changes work as expected on the live environment.

That said, we use Ubuntu servers and I've opted to use Ubuntu as my development environment as well, makes stuff so much easier.