Puppet is not a server provisioning tool. It's not a "roll-your-own" aptitude, it's a different approach to the problem. Puppet is primarily meant to manage the sort of end-user configuration for which packages only provide defaults. If you're handling all of that with the package manager, or if your need to manage configuration is minimal, then don't use puppet. It doesn't have lots of dependencies but it does have some, and it's language is syntaxy.
I'm not sure why you'd say puppet isnt a server provisioning tool. This managing of configurations you talk about, the way puppet interacts with package managers to install packages, these are the tasks I think about when I hear server provisioning.
Provisioning and configuration management are converging, but aren't the same thing. I agree that you can use puppet to help a lot with provisioning servers, but that's not its reason for being.
Provisioning is the process of taking a baremetal server and making it usable. Configuration management is about organizing ongoing changes to the infrastructure.
Red Hat Kickstart and Solaris Jumpstart are examples of provisioning tools that don't help much with configuration management. Cobbler is provisioning tool built on Kickstart. Systemimager is a cloning-style provisioning tool.
These tools all help you get an OS up and running on a machine. Optionally, most of them can be used to do a great deal of software installation and system configuration beyond the basic OS install. But most of them aren't, for example, especially interested in helping with issues like adding a new apache virtualhost to httpd.conf, or a new DNS zone to named.conf, or a new root cron entry to run on all application servers, or reconfigure iptables on every system. Tools like puppet and cfengine are very interested in these scenarios.
The line is fuzzy, but when standing on one side or the other its obviously there somewhere.
Yes, I liked the way it can be scripted, but I guess I did understand the purpose then. When you search on Google for provisioning servers + rails, you come onto Puppetmaster almost exclusively. I'll keep an eye on it anyway. Thanks for the insights.
Puppet is not a server provisioning tool. It's not a "roll-your-own" aptitude, it's a different approach to the problem. Puppet is primarily meant to manage the sort of end-user configuration for which packages only provide defaults. If you're handling all of that with the package manager, or if your need to manage configuration is minimal, then don't use puppet. It doesn't have lots of dependencies but it does have some, and it's language is syntaxy.