Setting up a development environment for drupal site I have a production site at example.com (with a subdomain multi-install) and I have been meaning to setup a development environment at beta.example.com (also having all of the multi-sites). I would like these machines to be as identical to each other as possible so the push from the development machine to the production machine goes very smoothly. Is it possible to have the sites folders named the same on the development machine as they are named on the production machine? That is, they do not have beta in the file name. Does this involve hostname rewriting? Can apache even do that?
Yes it is possible to have the same DIR structure as on your live site using sym links.

Suppose subsite.example.com is a folder on live site on production you need a link like beta-subsite.example.com -&gt; subsite.example.com And you can use subsite.example.com in both your environments.

SO folders on Live site will be


default
subsite.example.com


In dev environment one extra link has to be created pointing to subsite.example.com.