Personally, I don't have a branch that mirrors any particular environment for exactly the situation you're running into. I don't use source control to tell me what's deployed in any particular environment; I know others do. I use source control to tell me what state a particular thing is in. i.e. * whatever is on the

master

branch is Production ready; * whatever is in a

release/

branch is going through testing * whatever is in a

feature/

branch is in active development I make liberal and excessive use of the "Compare with File Cabinet" feature of @creece’s WebStorm plugin to tell me what's actually deployed