PuPHPet vs Puppet?

Question

I've been using PuPHPet to setup development / staging hosting environments and it's made for very simple and efficient deployments.

However, I'm running into a situation where I need to provide much more detailed directives in various server conf files (i.e., Nginx and Apache configs, cron jobs, etc) and PuPHPet doesn't allow me to do that.

My questions are:

Is PuPHPet intended purely for basic server setups only?

If you need to do more with your configuration, should you use PuPHPet, and then modify the manifests manually from there? Or is this bad because any updates to PuPHPet will overwrite said files?

And lastly, if you need fine tuned control, should you just be writing Puppet configs from scratch (without the use of PuPHPet)?

Edit: Not sure why this is being voted closed. I'm simply asking why one uses a custom Puppet config over Puphpet, and if they're capable of accomplishing the same provisioning tasks

Answer 1

Is PuPHPet intended purely for basic server setups only?

Puphpet is intended mostly for development environments, although I've added support for pushing to public servers. I've tried to use common sense when it comes to security, like the firewall and requiring a private key for the public servers.

That said, Puphpet is maintained by one person (me) and it only allows as detailed a server config as I've had the time to implement. For things like PHP and Apache, that's fairly in-depth. For things like Nginx, Ruby, Python, it's less-so.

If you need to do more with your configuration, should you use PuPHPet, and then modify the manifests manually from there?

Yes.

Or is this bad because any updates to PuPHPet will overwrite said files?

It's not bad, but if you regenerate the archive, then yes it will not take into account any addition things you may have done. I would suggest adding an addition .pp file within the nodes directory instead of writing into the included ones.

And lastly, if you need fine tuned control, should you just be writing Puppet configs from scratch (without the use of PuPHPet)?

Yes. If you require things that I've not implemented yet, then by all means write your own Puppet configs.