As you might know, I’m a bit of a fan of Munki and Puppet for managing the Macs I look after. Around a year ago, I really wanted to be able to automate my own setup across my own Macs the same way. I was forever finding that the particular git repository or app wasn’t on the Mac I was working on. Then there came the time when I wanted to do a clean install - that was easily a day down the drain there!
Automate all of the things
Then Boxen was released - based on Puppet, but targeted at setting up individual’s machines. I got on board just over a year ago, and haven’t really looked back - manually installing an app on my Mac seems very strange now. I’m not going to cover how to get started with Boxen, as there are many getting started guides out there (however, Gary Larizza’s is rather good).
There will come a time when you need to update the core part of Boxen. This happened to me when I clean installed 10.9 on my work laptop - all kinds of shit broke (somehow it managed to survive the upgrade process - go figure). I looked around, but couldn’t really find a definitive guide, so here it is (it’s shorter than this piece of rambling).
Ok, stop talking
As Boxen is made by GitHub, updating it is much like updating any other project on there that you’ve made a fork of. First we’re going to add it as a remote repository:
$ cd ~/src/our-boxen
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/boxen/our-boxen.git
Then we’re going to fetch the stuff from the upstream repository:
$ git fetch upstream
Now we’re going to merge the updated repository with our own:
$ git checkout master
$ git merge upstream/master
If you haven’t modified any of the core Boxen files (Puppetfile, Gemfile or manifests/site.pp in my case), you might get away without having to fix any conflicts (you can ignore any in Puppetfile.lock and Gemfile.lock, we’ll deal with those next). I had conflicts as I had previously:
- Been stupid and tried to update Boxen by just changing the Puppet Module and Gem versions
- Edited
site.ppas I didn’t want Nginx or node.js installed - Been dumb and put my custom Puppet modules in the wrong place in my
Puppetfile
None of these were particularly arduous to fix, but annoying none the less. If you find you have loads, you might want to run:
$ git mergetool
The next step is to update your Puppet modules and RubyGems. First delete Puppetfile.lock and Gemfile.lock. Now go back to your trusty Terminal and:
$ bundle install --without development
$ bundle exec librarian-puppet install --clean
At this point, you might want to go through the custom modules you’ve added to your Puppetfile and update those, although this is by no means required - some apps I’ve installed through Boxen don’t have a built in updater, so Boxen is more convenient than hunting for installers on various vendor’s websites. Once your modules are up to date in your Puppetfile, you’re done! You can now get your Mac back to how you like it by issuing the usual:
$ boxen