I just watched the “Easily Creating Your React Dev Environment” video. I want to set up my local development environment such that mimics the production. Mostly because our current production environment is simply a LAMP stack and I’d be deploying the first react project. We also lack a devops engineer here. So the lessons learned in setting up the dev environment will, with modification, carry me to stg and prod.
I am planning to look for a vagrant boxes that is setup with node.js and add to it create-react-app as a starting point.
Have any of you done a similar thing? Am I thinking about this the correct way?
I have not 
I don’t have much direct experience, but we tend to rely on Chef a lot. It helps have consistent builds.
We used to have a local vagrant build a while back for testing, but we ended up ditching it because of the added complexity. Now we just use a standard local HTTP server that calls out to deployed staging/production services. Any differences there might be between local (dev) and production (prod) ultimately get caught in the path to production (dev -> ci automation -> qa -> prod).