Great question. Github has a project called Boxen that does this for Mac OSX: http://boxen.github.com/ http://boxen.github.com/ Google uses their own Puppet s

Great question. Github has a project called Boxen that does this for Mac OSX: http://boxen.github.com/ http://boxen.github.com/ Google uses their own Puppet solution for their developer workstations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlKXRdSAZhY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlKXRdSAZhY Ansible will work great for this too - particularly if you're on Linux.