[mattbrewsbytes]

Build a custom box for Vagrant. I did this and now can spin up a CentOS 7 image with Apache, MySQL (Mariadb), RVM (ruby version manager) and a bunch of utilities (wget, curl, git, etc.) in a matter of minutes. I wrote up a how-to on my blog (in profile). I've tried Puppet but it just seemed like more trouble - that would be useful for 10's or 100's of nodes.

As an example, I wanted to try out Ghost to see if I liked that better than Jekyll/Octopress for a blog, so after 'vagrant init centos7' I had a VM running and I could screw up a ton of stuff then and not care.