Long-time Python user here. For a lot of my projects I write a shell script which builds all of the application dependencies (including services) into a projec

Long-time Python user here. For a lot of my projects I write a shell script which builds all of the application dependencies (including services) into a project directory and run them all from there. It takes a little bit of work to get going --- especially when building a new service for the first time --- but I like that it side-steps language-specific packaging tools (particularly the half-baked Python ones) and lets me pin an applications dependencies and port to various environments (develop on Mac, deploy on Unix) almost exactly. Integrating with Puppet/Chef is just a matter of breaking up the shell script into pieces.