Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Migrating Mage 2.4.4 from local docker/devilbox to whm 7

Firstly, thanks for any help in advance 🙂

I have successfully upgraded my magento 1.9 in my local dev environment to magento 2.4.4 (took ages and a lot of hair pulling, but I finally made it! lol)

I’m looking for some help / tips and tricks / sagely advice from smarter people than me on how to go ahead and move from local dev to prod.

Some questions that I have are:

  1. What’s the best way to move the new file onto the server?
    Should I zip up the files and just unzip it into a new magento2 folder?
    Or should I install magento2 afresh from composer and then copy over the new files on top?

  2. When I move my new files onto the server and I just copy over the magento2 folder, will I lose all the composer configurations / settings I had in my dev server? Or are all those composer settings actually inside that magento2 root folder already?

  3. When I move the new files onto the server, the files will have been created by a completely different user (devilbox), will that be a problem? I know the files should all be owned by the apache user, how do I move the files properly so that they have the correct user and permissions?

  4. Can I keep my Magento 1 on the server, just in case I switch over and for some reason 1 or 2 days later it doesn’t work, what’s the best solution set it up so that I can just easily switch back in case of problems?

  5. WHM uses easy apache 4 – which is the best configuration for me to select for Magento 2.4.4?

Are there any other tips and tricks and best practices to be aware of when doing this? If you’ve done this before, maybe you ran into a problem that you didn’t anticipate that you could share with me?

Thank you for imparting your knowledge peeps!! 🙂