Many issues can arise from developers not testing with the proper versions of software on their local machines, but the average Drupal hosting stack is growing in complexity, with many sites utilizing Varnish, memcached, SOLR, and the like. Wouldn't it be great to have tools that help you manage configurations on your production environments and also test easily on developers' machines? They exist: Vagrant and Puppet.

This session will be an introduction to using the Puppet configuration management system and the Vagrant gem for setting up homogenous virtual machines.

Puppet is an open source tool that allows developers and system administrators to test and manage their servers configurations. I will cover managing a typical complex Drupal hosting configuration.

During the session, we'll write a Puppet manifest, apply it to a virtual machine, and show how a full stack with Varnish on CentOS 6 can be tested off of a local checkout of a site on a Macintosh laptop.

My presentation (in Prezi format) is available online at http://prezi.com/bn_nnczm1jc_/drupalcamp-nyc-better-local-qa-testing-wit... .