Puppet a developer workstation from scratch.

This is a work in progress!

This is super-alpha; I'm currently running this on my machine to drive out changes and bugfixes. The list of to-dos is still incredibly long, and I would not recommend using this until it's a little further along.

At this point I'm developing this in a single repository, but I plan on extracting the osx-specific puppet extensions into their own modules once I'm happy with them.

Holy Grail

1. Install OSX Snow Leopard
2. gem install puppet
3. curl -O http://someday.github.com/phinze/puppet-workstation.tgz && tar zxf puppet-workstation.tgz
4. cd puppet-workstation; ~/.gem/ruby/1.8/puppet apply puppet.pp
5. Enjoy fully installed and configured developer workstation.

Secondary Goals

• acquire root privs only when necessary, and make it obvious why they are necessary when password is requested
• properly connect puppet requires -- only one invocation of puppet apply should be necessary
• don't give puppet the ability change anything that it does not also have the ability to change back

Current features

macapp package provider

• Given a URL, will download and install a mac application
• Started as a combination of the existing pkgdmg and appdmg providers
• Now will recognize and install app and pkg files inside of dmg, zip, and, tgz containers
• Has ability to source applications from Dropbox for non-publically-available apps with dropbox://
• TODO: support elevating privileges when installing pkgs that require it, so puppet itself does not need

apple_preference resource type

• Low-level wrapper allowing the maintenance of speicifc keys in Apple Preference plist files
• Currently successfully used to:
  • script the mapping of capslock to control
  • provide some basic settings around the dock
• Plan is to extend this with children to a cleaner interface for Dock settings, Adium accounts, and other fun plist-backed settings

homebrew package provider

• Borrowing this from jedi4ever; so far I haven't had to even look at the code. Thanks jedi4ever!
• TODO: have puppet manage the install homebrew itself

pip package provider

• Borrowing this from rcrowley; forked and hacked it up a bit; planning to push changes back up. Thanks rcrowley!
• TODO: automatically have all pip provided packages depend on the pip homebrew package

A small selection of future features

• Install and manage rvm rubies and gemsets
• Clone git repositories into place
• Clone and symlink in dotfiles from a repository
• Lots of app-specfic configuration abilities: Terminal, Adium, Chrome, other System Preferences
• Pies; skies; etc...

Weirdness with launchd services

Puppet comes with a built-in launchd provider for services, but I've been having quite a bit of trouble with it.

This was one thing I had to do:

sudo chgrp admin /var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd/overrides.plist sudo chmod 660 /var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd/overrides.plist

Another problem is launchctl will be unable to connect to the correct socket when run from tmux, unless it's being run from sudo. This means that 'com.apple.Dock.agent' won't show up in launchctl list. I'm punting on launchd services for now and doing a killall Dock to make Dock config settings take effect.