Switching to boxen ?

UPDATE : new post to replace the lost one from SeiiChi Yonezawa https://coderwall.com/p/kppokq

Some time ago, the octocats freed another tool from their toolbox : boxen. Lots of things were said about it.

To put it simply it's simple tool to make the setup of a new Apple computer a breeze.

It relies upon puppet (one of the two big ruby devop tools) and some nice other Ruby-fu.

Up to now I was using Thoughbot's scripts to handle my Apple machines setup, it worked quite nicely, although if you only install one computer per year, you might have to look around and fiddle a bit to fix some out of date stuff.

A co-worker needed an easy way to get a ruby env running ... So I checked boxen.

The first things you read when checking https://github.com/boxen/our-boxen is that you have to simply trash most of your os x sweet setup in order to get things going with Boxen. That is something that almost turned me around. Pushed by the need and my backups I decided I could try. Plus nobody complained about boxen recently so it should mean it's working properly.

The previous readme is quite enough to get started but Seiichi Yonezawa has written a very nice piece about how to jump to boxen : https://coderwall.com/p/d8iw2g . Jumping between that article and the readme was enough for me to destroy and rebuild my setup. No sweat.

Difficulties : I was using rvm up to now, the default in the boxen initial script is rbenv, so some things needed to be updated in my head.

Some things do make me cringe a bit like the fact that we need to write in 2 separate files when we want to add a module ... Maybe I'm missing something here to understand that but I'm thinking about writing a little thing to solve this.
Otherwise I can't wait but check how fast I can deploy more computers with this setup.

What you want to read :

• Boxen : http://boxen.github.com
• Boxen readme and initial repository : https://github.com/boxen/our-boxen
• Seiichi Yonezawa's article : https://coderwall.com/p/d8iw2g
• Remove rvm script https://gist.github.com/mxcl/1173223
• Switch from rvm to rbenv http://etehtsea.me/migration-from-rvm-to-rbenv
• A bit about gemsets in rbenv : http://devoh.com/blog/2012/07/implicit-gemsets-with-rbenv
• UPDATE new post to replace the one from Seiichi Yonezawa as it has been deleted https://coderwall.com/p/kppokq

Was it worth it ? Yes. It's definitely smoother than Thoughbot's scripts.

In the end, less than 2 hours were needed to get the box from old to new setup.