Boxen: How to Manage an Army of Laptops and Live to Talk About It
summary
Boxen is an idempotent, puppet‑based system for provisioning Mac laptops that GitHub open‑sourced in January 2013 it ships a library of puppet modules and Ruby hooks, manages full project stacks (nginx mysql redis specific Ruby versions) and uses the GitHub issues API to auto‑file failures the repo split shows adoption at scale — 158 employees total 64 people (≈41%) committed personal or project manifests yet only 7 Ops knew Puppet before it was adopted, proving practical success.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (12)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:56Why you should give a damn
- 4:27What is Boxen
- 6:00Managing Projects
- 7:54Personalization
- 9:20How does it work
- 12:39What are the problems
- 13:36What can we do
- 16:18Do whatever works
- 16:44Idempotent behavior
- 17:38Chef
- 18:21Security
related talks
31mOps For Everyone
24mTaming Your Inner Cowboy Coder - A Simple And Sane DevOps Workflow
37mDevOps for the Rubyist Soul
18mShipping at Scale: ChatOps at GitHub #bbuzz
53mChange your tools, change your outcome
15mPuppet and containers: A multi-tenancy deployment
36mChatOps at GitHub
33mUsing Ruby to Automate Your Life