I like the idea of using Vagrant to create virtual machines for my development work. Doing things this way I think keeps the host machine cleaner and allows you the ability to distribute those VM's to other people as well. My old boss Ben Ramsey did a very informative post on getting PHP 5.4 configured on CentOS so I decided to one-up him by taking his instructions and creating a Puppet manifest so you could do this using Vagrant or on any server that you can provision using Puppet.

He example is based off of the publiclly available Vagrant setup and provides the contents of the Vagrantfile that he uses to set up the machine. From there, Puppet takes over and uses his configuration (also included) to set up things like the Apache server, some configurations for it, a list of PHP extensions and, of course, PHP itself.