Disclaimer: I am the creator of what I'm about to plug here.
If anyone is looking for an easy, low-risk, documented method of beginning development in VMs, check out Vagrant[1], which is what I wrote this for. Creating dev VMs from scratch is pretty tedious and there are a lot of steps involved. Vagrant abstracts this away and provides a tool to automate all of this in a reproducible manner.
I started using vagrant last week to debug my Chef scripts and it is indeed awesome. Vagrant uses Chef (chef-solo) configure your VM from bare image to working server.
I see that is has a plug in system for other provision systems like Puppet, but the chef support works great out of the box.
I was hoping to contribute to the project by integrating fog the ruby library which talks to many cloud systems including EC2 so someone could build an image via Chef or Puppet, dev and test in their image, then provision and upload to the cloud. Could probably do this without integrating with vagrant by building a clever rake or capistrano script.
I love vagrant!
It was super easy to create an archlinux base box and i've been using chef to automatically provision environments. Setting up the environment for a new project takes minutes and is both totally automated and separated from my actual OS.
Thanks!
If anyone is looking for an easy, low-risk, documented method of beginning development in VMs, check out Vagrant[1], which is what I wrote this for. Creating dev VMs from scratch is pretty tedious and there are a lot of steps involved. Vagrant abstracts this away and provides a tool to automate all of this in a reproducible manner.
[1]: http://vagrantup.com