I'll admit that I don't see what the advantage of soloist is. What I would probably do is build the runlist via include_recipe statements in pivotal_workstation

I'll admit that I don't see what the advantage of soloist is. What I would probably do is build the runlist via include_recipe statements in pivotal_workstation::default. Then I would create a Berkfile (http://berkshelf.com/ http://berkshelf.com/) for it, use 'berks install --path' to bundle pivotal_workstation and all its dependencies, and tar that up and upload it somewhere. The bootstrap then becomes something like gem install chef echo {"run_list": "recipe[pivotal_workstation]"} > node.json chef-solo -j node.json -r http://example.com/pivotal_workstation.tar.gz The JSON could of course be customized if you needed to set any attributes.