Update 2016/07/06: You should probably not be using Vagrant (and Puphpet) anymore now that we live in the wonderful world of Docker containers. I will leave this blog post online for now, but take this information as ‘extremely outdated’.
Puphpet is, beside a horrible word to type, a great tool to create specific Vagrant images that contain a very fine-tuned development stack for PHP development.
The website generates puppet scripts that will provision a Vagrant image with your specific configuration. Using the online configuration tool you have huge selection of things to include in your image:
- Ubuntu or CentOS base images
- apache or nginx webservers
- php versions from early 5 version to php 7 releases candidates and even [HHVM](https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/
- MySQL or MariaDB
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Reddis
- SQLite
- Mailcatcher
- Beanstalkd
- RabbitMQ
- Elasticsearch
- Apache Solr (4.x and 5. versions)
Even if you know nothing of server setups this is a great tool to build a production-like environment to develop on. It’s easy to commit these config files in your git repository and let co-workers use them without having to configure one single thing about it.
If you haven’t used Vagrant yet, you are living in the past and should really catch up