Automated provisioning of development environment

It's pretty common to use automated scripting tools (chef, puppet, etc) for provisioning your servers, but what about your development environment tools? It's far too common that developers are developing and testing with different versions of the software that is used in production. This also leads to each developer having different versions of tools, which often leads to "It works on my machine."

I've split this problem into two parts - IDE and tooling. Most of our developers use Eclipse, so I've geared my automation efforts toward Eclipse. Using the Eclipse p2 director, it is easy to script the installation of common plugins, settings, etc. Rather than mandating that developers download a pre-packaged distribution of Eclipse (which we then need to maintain), they can download whichever one they want (though most of developers use the Java EE version).

Using the p2 director application, we have a simple groovy script that does the following:

${eclipseExecutable} -application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director -repository ${repoString} -installIU ${featuresString} -tag InstallInitialPlugins -destination ${eclipsePath} -profile ${profile}

Hopefully the variable names are self explanatory.

For tooling standardization (maven, java, etc), I've setup some simple puppet scripts to pull in those tools (I'm currently working in Windows, and Puppet seems to work better than Chef on Windows). This does not connect to a puppet server, rather we just have a directory on our server that has the necessary files. The script just installs a couple of executables and copies some zipfile distributions. Since our toolsets are not changing all that frequently, the script is run on demand, but it could be setup with a Puppet server on a polling interval if desired. For more complex environments, a virtual machine could be configured with vagrant/chef.