A local version of Ghost should be enough for this, especially if it’s a vanilla install All a “production” install does is improve reliability and performance
ghost install has several flags for more advanced installations. If you’re looking to create a local ghost install with a MySQL backend, you can run ghost install --db mysql
For local development it might me easier to just do an export via Settings → Labs → Export and then import that to a ghost install local instance running SQLite, that’s generally what I do when working on themes