In order to more effectively manage the Jenkins project's infrastructure these manifests have been created. There a couple of reasons for this:

• Reproducibility: In the unfortunate scenario where a meteor falls on a datacenter where Jenkins hardware exists, we want to be able to bring a new host on to fulfill those needs as soon as possible.
• Distributable: With Puppet manifests stored in this repository, it is easier to accept infrastructure help from members of the Jenkins community, without necessarily giving root access out.
• Accountability: By funneling as much infrastructure work through Puppet as possible, we can have ensure the project has a very clear audit trail for specific infrastructure changes.

We use Vagrant to develop and test these manifests and as such there is a Vagrantfile already in the root directory. If you don't already have Vagrant:

% sudo gem install vagrant

Once you have vagrant you should be able to execute the following command to bring up a test virtual machine and provision it:

% vagrant up

For development, you can just create your manifests and include them in manifests/vagrant.pp, once you're ready to re-run the puppet manifests you can run the following command (no need to rebuild the VM):

% vagrant provision

If you have any questions, stop by the #jenkins channel on the Freenode network and ask rtyler.

Failing that, the jenkinsci-users@ mailing list is a good place to ask for help.