Hi Bilal

I would say the best thing to try is NuGet everything you can - more and more umbraco packages are available as nuget packages and this means all the required dll's and files get included in the project so when you deploy / publish everything will get copied over to the other environment.

however if you can't get nuget version of a package, then you either:

• have to install it at both ends.
• keep track of what it changes and include those files. **
• create your own local nuget packages that you can use to deploy.

* *you're right that some some packages - do things like custom DB settings as part of their post install so the copy / own nuget method might miss things.

Generally you can tell if a package does anything clever by looking in the package zip file at the packages.xml file - This is the config file that tells umbraco how to install a package. Mostly this will be copying files - and these packages can usually just have those files copied between installations.

but you will be able to see if a package creates doctypes or datatpes, and if their is anything in the packageActions section, then it might be doing some custom db stuff as well.

Those packages will be best installed at both ends.

I tried to create a usync.packageEdition a while back but the custom db stuff scuppered it at the time :(