[gchpaco]

Chef is a nice idea written by people who don't understand Unix. (evidence? check out popen in their source, try to figure out why subprocesses occasionally get SIGPIPE, and then grep to see where it's used and count the file handle leaks. I've had to reimplement that six or seven times and theirs was the one with the most subtle errors. Yes, I'll submit a patch when I have time, which at the current rate the day job is pushing me will happen shortly before hell freezes over) I like the design but the implementation scares me.

Puppet is the more mature technology of the two, but (so I'm told) there's an important limitation in that there is no way to automatically e.g. reload the web server if its config file changes. Both these systems have some issues with information flowing in only one direction.

[omarqureshi]

For puppet, so long as the service that you have has a stop and start setting (i've not come across one that doesn't) and you've told the service to subscribe to a file for changes - then it should automatically do a stop+start at the very least.

[kennu]

In Puppet you can specify dependencies between Services and Files, so that a service is automatically restarted when a file changes.

The only trick is that Puppet must be aware of the file change. This happens automatically when the file is modified by Puppet. But if it's modified externally by a shell script or a git pull, you need to have Puppet copy that file to another "dummy" file, so it can detect that it changed from the previous version and trigger the restart.

What a "service restart" means can also be configured if you want a SIGHUP or something else. The default is the equivalent of "/etc/init.d/nginx restart".