Vagrant - Chef/Puppet

[Michael Beasterfeld]

Working through the Vagrant tutorial and I'm presented with a choice between Chef and Puppet for VM setup.  Any advantage to using one over the other if I don't have any real experience with either?

[John Kary]

It usually comes down to personal preference.

Many Puppet advocates claim Chef is simply a Ruby DSL wrapping shell script execution. I don't argue with that point, but I preferred Chef (chef-solo to be exact) because it was pretty easy to find open-source cookbooks to install the packages I needed.

Puppet is powerful in its own right, and my in interpretation, it seemed to closely model an object-like structure. But I was able to get up and going with Chef pretty easily so I took path of lease resistance.

For standing up a single simple development VM, Chef was good enough for me and does everything I've needed it to do.

John Kary

[Aaron Sumner]

I've gone through tutorials on both--I found that seeing how they each handled the same tasks helped me get a handle on the big picture. I'll probably be going with Chef when it's time to put things into production, for the same reasons John mentions.

Aaron