In order to ensure your changes work, you should always be running hugo's webserver locally:
hugo serve
and testing your changes in your web browser.
In order to "ship what we build", it is entirely possible to build and run the Docker container that is shipped to production on your desktop.
Note: at the moment, this is only fully automated for Linux and MacOS. An imminent release of WSL2 should allow Windows users to follow the same instructions.
In the root of the repository, simply type make
or make help
to get a list of make targets.
Then simply run:
make prod-docker-serve
and that will make the production Docker image, and run it on port 8888 on your desktop.