I've spent some time the last couple of weeks playing around with Puppet (and Vagrant) on Windows after reading through Puppet Cookbook and Beginner's guide from John Arundel. Even though the books doesn't cover Windows that much they are a good introduction to Puppet.
I'll post a longer post later on describing what I've done in more detail, but as of know I just thought I would point you to the repos and links where you can see me playing with this stuff.
- WinPuppet - this is where I keep the puppet code for this experiment
- NirvanaService - a service wrapper that allow you to basically wrap any executable as a service in a really flexible manner
- My nuget feed - this is a where I keep random Chocolatey packages, try
nuget list -source https://www.myget.org/F/crazy-choco/
To get started you should just be able to clone the WinPuppet repo and run vagrant up (if you have vagrant installed and virtualbox installed). That will download a vagrant box, create a vm from the box, install puppet, install chocolatey and provision the virtual machine.
So far I think everything works really smooth. Everything above is work in progress, but I think the NirvanaService is sort of version 1, at least for my needs. The way I've done it is to create chocolatey packages for things I would like to install, use the chocolatey provider in puppet to install them and then run executable with NirvanaService. Please come with feedback or suggestion if you have any.