When installing a SSL on the production environment, would it be wise to also install this on a staging environment?
Especially when tacking additional costs into account of the extra SSL certificate.
It would be best to mimic production as good as possible, so that would include a certificate.
You can do two things:
1) Buy a cheap $10 certificate
2) Create a selfsigned certificate.
The latter option will give you a message that it can't validate the certificate, but this is fine because it's only staging.
Example:
You have to set the certificates in your server: Linux, Windows, Mac
Next, you have to install the certificate*:
Apache, Nginx
* - this dependents on your OS