Introducing Boxen

This is pretty cool. There are some other companies that have released similar tools in the past. I personally tried out:<p>* Thoughtbot's laptop script - <a href="http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/8700977975/2011-rubyists-guide-to-a-mac-os-x-development" rel="nofollow">http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/8700977975/2011-rubyists-g...</a><p>* Lunar Logic's Lunar Station - <a href="https://github.com/LunarLogicPolska/lunar-station" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LunarLogicPolska/lunar-station</a><p>* Pivotal Labs's Pivotal Workstation - <a href="https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation</a><p>I personally liked Pivotal Workstation the best, as it had the best combination of robustness, pre-built recipes, and easy configurability. I'll be excited to take a look at Boxen the next time we bring someone into our team.

A tool-chain like this is needed for Apple to move widely into the enterprise. As a sysadmin, it is a <i>major</i> pain to worry about unpatched, outdated, apple laptops that have to conform to a security policy. Without automated tools like this, you are left running around patching the latest java/flash/pdf issue!

This sounds awesome!<p>That being said, there's not a chance in hell I'd install so much stuff onto my mac.<p>IMO, Vagrant and VM's in general are what you should use to develop your web applications. (I happen to be opinionated about this :D )<p>Mainly this is because I believe in matching your production environment for development.<p>It's also because I'm anal about installing memory-using apps into my little MBA.<p>However, for things like Minecraft, onepassword, wget, sublime text 2 - this is really awesome.

I'm not trying to flamebait, but are macs so popular that it's just assumed that all new hires want one as their tool? At my company we're still asking new employees which platform they want to work on, is this falling out of fashion?

Honest question; I've never understood why people have such a fixation on puppet-style tools.<p>Small-scale? Run a simple script. Large-scale? Use a network-hosted configuration (optimally read-only root and network booting so the entire system is known-good) to avoid the entire class of configuration drift / migration / state-accrual problems associated with the above.<p>I just see puppet as sort of trying to provide the latter and failing, resulting in a complex version of the former.

Clever name. <a href="http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/b/boxen.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/b/boxen.html</a>

We've opened up #boxen on freenode for questions and discussion. We'll idle there whenever we can.

Looks very similar to Vagrant: <a href="http://www.vagrantup.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vagrantup.com/</a>

Isn't puppet overkill for this? Seems like a bunch of ruby to build command line arguments. Bash would have been easier. We have a workstation dotfiles which we clone and execute an install script with plugins for oh-my-zsh.

Does it work well with Homebrew, or does it subsume that functionality?

"brutalize a key with your favorite finger"

Massive ruby framework that only runs on macs? Yuck.

This looks pretty great. We do something slightly similar at Chartbeat, but using puppet + ubuntu server VMs on our macs. Enables us to to develop on the same hardware we'll be using in production. Our CTO wrote a blog post about it here if anyone is interested:<p><a href="http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2012/09/24/devvm/" rel="nofollow">http://engineering.chartbeat.com/2012/09/24/devvm/</a>

This reminds me of radmind: <a href="http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/" rel="nofollow">http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/</a><p>Lots of good ideas in there (some of which inspired early work on dotCloud, including <a href="https://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets</a> )

I just can't keep track of SCM systems any more...<p>Calgon, take me away.

This looks very nice -- automated workflow setup for developers. It's essentially generalization across every "developer setup guide" you could possibly imagine.<p>Now the question is: can we get this for Linux users?

This is awesome and a long-time coming. If you're setting up a developer box, the last step should deploy to production :)

I had built something very similar to this a while ago, based off of the pivotal idea but with a one-liner install.<p><a href="https://github.com/seryl/kindness" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/seryl/kindness</a><p>supports updating itself and it's templates form the git repo it's referencing.

We use babushka for local machine config and also production. It's radically simpler than Puppet/Chef.<p><a href="http://babushka.me/" rel="nofollow">http://babushka.me/</a>

This might be enough for me to settle on Puppet over Chef. Haven't really compared them in depth and only played around with Chef so far.<p>Either way it seems pretty cool.

Would be interesting to know what made them settle on Puppet instead of Chef. Thought the guys at Github were big Ruby-Lovers...

"Boxen" is the German word for "Boxing".<p>I learnt this when I considered starting a linux-optimised PC business back in the early noughties.

This looks very promising. Thanks, GitHub!

I can't bring myself to trust a project that has such horrible commit messages, even if it is github.

Heard about this a while back from a beta user. Very excited to start playing with it!

--&#62; You must be running OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). :(

This looks very promising.

cool.