Together with other tools, setting up a complete development environment with just a single command is not only reality, but it's becoming for a lot of developers a daily practice. But even for open source projects like joind.in and protalk.me are seeing the benefits of having "development environment on the fly". New contributors don't have to spend a lot of time setting up their environment, but it's automatically generated: the code setup, the database server together with a filled set of data, any additional components like varnish, memcache, reddis etc. This blog post gives an overview on how to setup a symfony2 project with the help of vagrant and puppet.

He provides you with some examples in the form of a Vagrantfile that sets up a 64 bit CentOS instance and configures the server with a few settings and points it to a Puppet configuration. He includes a basic set of Puppet configuration examples and shows how to use it to install various packages, set up MySQL, load phpMyAdmin, configure PHP and, finally, bootstrap the Symfony2 by seeding a Doctrine schema.