Indeed. Puppet was created in Ruby and thus requires it to function. Puppet is generally meant to be a replacement for configuration scripts. Essentially your

Indeed. Puppet was created in Ruby and thus requires it to function. Puppet is generally meant to be a replacement for configuration scripts. Essentially your Puppet scripts define a 'state' that you want the server to be in, thus if you want a user account called 'bob' you'd do something like this: user {'bob': ensure => present, gid => '0', uid => '0', password => '<my encrypted password>', } From this Puppet would do all the 'difficult' bits for you. You mention that if you get paid to write Puppet scripts you wouldn't need to know how things work at the shell level. That is extremely far from the truth. You need a strong background and experience with shell commands, configuration layouts, shell/CLI methodology, etc. Without those you would quickly be lost both in terms of managing and dealing with Puppet and scripting in it. Knowing Puppet is no replacement for Shell knowledge unless the extent of what you need to do with Puppet is understand you're using it to launch your Vagrant instances. Honestly there are things which to build out in Puppet would require extensive Ruby based functions and sometimes you really just need to fall back to using exec {} statements in Puppet (Meaning you're running shell commands from within Puppet). You can see some examples of this in the zookeeper module I built: https://github.com/justicel/puppet-zookeeper https://github.com/justicel/puppet-zookeeper Feel free to message me with Puppet questions and really, if you're just using Shell scripts I highly, highly recommend moving toward configuration-management (even if it's not Puppet), unless you only have one or two servers to manage.