Using Vagrant, why is puppet provisioning better than a custom packaged box?

Question

I\'m creating a virtual machine to mimic our production web server so that I can share it with new developers to get them up to speed as quickly as possible. I\'ve been through

Answer 1

One great advantages not explicitly mentioned above is the fact that you'd be documenting your setup (properly), and your documentation will be the actual setup - not a (one-time) description of how things were/may have been intended to be.

Answer 2

Advantages:

As dependencies may change over time, building a new box from scratch will involve either manually removing packages, or throwing the box away and repeating the installation process by hand all over again. You could obviously automate the installation with a bash or some other type of script, but you'd be making calls to the native OS package manager, meaning it will only run on the operating system of your choice. In other words, you're boxed in ;)

As far as I know, Puppet (like Chef) contains a generic and operating system agnostic way to install packages, meaning manifests can be run on different operating systems without modification.

Additionally, those same scripts can be used to provision the production machine, meaning that the development machine and production will be practically identical.

Disadvantages:

Having to learn another DSL, when you may not be planning on ever switching your OS or production environment. You'll have to decide if the advantages are worth the time you'll spend setting it up. Personally, I think that having an abstract and repeatable package management/configuration strategy will save me lots of time in the future, but YMMV.