Puppet has become my go to system management tool in no small part because it is the tool that the operations group at $DAYJOB has standardized on for our production infrastructure management. It took quite a while for me to get the hang of how Puppet does what it does, but today I'd say I'm a fairly decent Puppet programmer. Every once in a while however I stumble on something new and surprising.

Boxen is a framework and collection of libraries created by the fine folks at GitHub to make setting up and managing Mac OS X computers easy and repeatable. Rather than a simple set of shell scripts or other provisioning tools, Boxen uses Puppet to automate installing and configuring software. I don't have the time or space to explain how great Puppet is a configuration management is, so you'll have to trust me or go do your own research.

Anybody could take a stab at rolling their own collection of Puppet manifests to manage their laptop or their corporate install base. That's actually exactly what GitHub did to create Boxen. Having tried (and failed) at doing just that before I was pretty impressed when I gave Boxen a test drive. GitHub has not only provided a system that "works for them"; they have also managed to engineer a reasonably extensible solution for a very complex problem.

You can use your favorite search engine to find folks who can wax poetic about the magnitude of this accomplishment. Let's get on with a description of what I've been able to do with it.