rump

At work I recently started to use masterless puppet to manage a working environment (e.g. directory structure, shell configuration, packages installed into our own RPM database) on compute clusters we use but don't have root access to. It was much easier to get working than I expected. Looking at the source for rump (https://github.com/railsmachine/rump) was helpful when determining the proper directory structure and puppet command line options.

Given that, I'd definitely recommend you check out Rump: https://github.com/railsmachine/rump It'll let you manage your servers in a headless manner, using simple version control via git to manage your puppet configuration. [Disclaimer: I work for Rails Machine.]

You may be interested in checking out Rump: https://github.com/railsmachine/rump [Disclaimer: I work for Rails Machine.] It's essentially a headless puppet that centers around a workflow of testing changes from an individual checkout of the puppet code on a target server, testing no-op applies of the manifests, and applying the manifest until you're happy enough to commit, push, and roll-out. This won't help with your second annoyance, sadly, but it should definitely help with the first in quickly pinpointing these sorts of issues without having a messy commit history.