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I am really having a hard time seeing the value in this. All of the mentioned hosting services provide control panels that allow you to quickly provision a server. Running git pull from Github is pretty simple. I love Laravel and want to support Taylor but I'm just not seeing the benefit.


It's not simply provisioning the server. It's also installing all the relevant packages, configuration, and deployment. The value is toward people who don't have the sysadmin/devops skills (or perhaps time) to manage that themselves.


Are there not existing Chef/Puppet recipes that will do this for you?

I guess it gives you a nice web front-end, and maybe a bit of confidence that the configuration was designed by a professional?


Chef/Puppet are way too hefty for many small sites/devs. There are a lot of devs out there still setting up servers by hand who'd jump at something like Forge.


This is why I built Overcast. It's a CLI tool so there's no GUI, but I've tried to make it conceptually simple and possible to pick up right away:

    overcast digitalocean create my-app
    overcast run my-app install/core install/php install/apache install/mysql
http://andrewchilds.github.io/overcast/


Puppet provisions fine on an EC2 micro instance. It's no heftier than the software you'd want it to install to run your site anyways.


Hefty in learning curve, not system resources.


I created a FOSS project called PuPHPet[0] to help with the learning curve. So far it's been well received!

[0] https://puphpet.com


PuPHPet is a great project. It served as great "training wheels" for me while I was learning vagrant+puppet. Thanks for making it.


Ok, thank you for the explanation. I can see how this would be more helpful for people without as much experience.




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