Tear down and Rebuilding Mac OS X

I recently decided that I needed to reinstall OS X on my iMac. I have been upgrading for years, and I just wanted to have a clean slate. This didn't mean that I wanted to have to a new home directory or anything. I just wanted to clean up after using ports, homebrew, manual installs, etc...

So, to start this project, I decided I would restore my home directory from a time machine back up. That was the easy part. The second part, how will I get Python, Ruby, Git, Vagrant, etc installed and configured quickly... and most importantly if I wanted to do this again how would I go about automating. Enter Boxen. I had read about this and used Puppet to manage farms of Linux servers so it felt like a good fit. After reading the docs... looking at the code... I decided to trust it to rebuild my iMac.

The results? AWESOME! 

I now store my configuration on GitHub... 

My home directory is safe through time machine...

I can rebuild my entire system without worrying about the final state. The coolest thing, is that I can manage pretty much everything I want through Boxen. 

I highly recommend taking a look.