[filsmick]

Since a few people mentioned Vagrant: can I use it to set up a production environment locally, with all the system dependencies, configuration files, and then pushing it to production? If so, is this the recommended approach?

[snowwrestler]

I'm not a Vagrant expert. I think it's possible to just ship a Vagrant file to the production server and turn it on, but I think the real value comes when it is used with a configuration management solution like Chef or Puppet. Use that to standardize between production and Vagrant, and then you can just deploy the application from one environment to the other without worrying about environment problems.