Ask HN: How to replicate dev and production?

I'm trying to determine how I should set up a virtual machine to match my production environment. The choices between Salt, Chef, Ansible, Puppet, etc. are overwhelming. They also all seem to have a focus on many machines in a network, whereas I'm just worried about my local dev VM and a single VPS for personal projects. Maybe I should just use a plain bash script? All I'm looking to do is automate the installation of nginx, node, etc.. Configure all the virtual sites, create and manage some user accounts and other configuration.