Workflow for developing locally then using FTP to push to remote host

Hi all, I’m trying to understand my web development workflow better, and, in particular, sharpen my tools. In summary, it seems that standard practice is to develop locally and then use FTP (I assume SFTP or FTPS these days) to push to deploy your site. Is this right?

The obvious difficulty there is that the local environment and remote one will differ in subtle ways and not-so-subtle ways. So that clearly requires care.

What is a professional toolchain that supports such workflow? I’m the kind of developer who would rather write HTML+CSS+JS by hand using Emacs, but I’m sure there are other very useful tools :slight_smile:

I also personally prefer the traditional client-server abstraction to the SPA model.

If anybody has any suggestions, I’d be very appreciative. Thank you!!

Andrew