Our Boxen

This is a template Boxen project designed for your organization to fork and modify appropriately. The Boxen rubygem and the Boxen puppet modules are only a framework for getting things done. This repository template is just a basic example of how to do things with them.

Getting Started

1. Install XCode Command Line Tools and/or full XCode.
2. Create a new repository on GitHub as your user for your Boxen. (eg. wfarr/my-boxen). Make sure it is a private repository!
3. Get running like so:

mkdir -p ~/src/my-boxen
cd ~/src/my-boxen
git init
git remote add upstream https://github.com/boxen/our-boxen
git fetch upstream
git co -b master upstream/master
git remote add origin https://github.com/wfarr/my-boxen
git push origin master

script/boxen

1. Close and reopen your Terminal. If you have a shell config file (eg. ~/.bashrc) you'll need to add this at the very end: [ -f /opt/boxen/env.sh ] && source /opt/boxen/env.sh, and reload your shell.
2. Confirm the Boxen env has loaded: boxen --env

Now you have your own my-boxen repo that you can hack on. You may have noticed we didn't ask you to fork the repo. This is because when our-boxen goes open source that'd have some implications about your fork also potentially being public. That's obviously quite bad, so that's why we strongly suggest you create an entirely separate repo and simply pull the code in, as shown above.

What You Get

This template project provides the following by default:

• Homebrew
• Git
• Hub
• DNSMasq w/ .dev resolver for localhost
• NVM
• RBenv
• Full Disk Encryption requirement
• NodeJS 0.4
• NodeJS 0.6
• NodeJS 0.8
• Ruby 1.8.7
• Ruby 1.9.2
• Ruby 1.9.3
• Ack
• Findutils
• GNU-Tar

Customizing

You can always check out the number of existing modules we already provide as optional installs under the boxen organization. These modules are all tested to be compatible with Boxen. Use the Puppetfile to pull them in dependencies automatically whenever boxen is run.

Node definitions

Puppet has the concept of a 'node', which is essentially the machine on which Puppet is running. Puppet looks for node definitions in the manifests/site.pp file in the Boxen repo. You'll see a default node declaration that looks like the following:

node default {
  # core modules, needed for most things
  include dnsmasq
  <...>
}

All Puppet class declarations should be included in the default node definition. Theoretically, you COULD declare every Puppet resource in the manifests/site.pp file, but that would quickly become unwieldy. Instead, it's easier to create Puppet modules inside the modules folder of the Boxen repo. Boxen is setup to discover any modules you create in the modules folder, and we've already created a people and projects module structure for you to start using.

Creating a personal module

See the documentation in the modules/people directory for creating per-user modules that don't need to be applied globally to everyone.

Creating a project module

See the documentation in the modules/projects directory for creating organization projects (read: repositories that people will be working in).

Binary packages

We support binary packaging for everything in Homebrew, RBEnv, and NVM. See config/boxen.rb for the environment variables to define.