When I was trying my first application on both development and production machines, the changes I had to make on index.php and config file was really starting to get on my nerves. I like working on my local machine as it’s much faster and I get much more configuration freedom. But sooner or later (hopefully sooner as projects die from old age too) the time will come then you will have to test your application on a live environment. You might get lucky and your development and production environments will be the same, but most of the time it won’t. You framework on a production machine will be camping at different location, and you will need different credentials to get into ‘Database castle’ so it starts eating a lot of time and patience to keep these small changes between different environments. And you’re lucky if it’s only two machines, what about a third server with different configurations, what about the fourth.. oh what a nightmare..

After reading a few wiki articles about working on different environments, a lazy mage guild in my head started having a discussion, and after a little bit of trial and error, I ended up with a solution I’m quite happy about, at least for now. With a few simple modifications, now I can work on my local machine, and then I decide how it will work in “real world” I just upload the files and that’s it. No time spent changing the database connection settings or any other differences, I can just high five myself and have a happy grin, rather that pulling a bunch of my hair. You can find the full tutorial on it at Yii framework wiki article.