[jorisd]

If managing shell scripts becomes too unwieldy, you could use Puppet or Ansible to provision your local machine, just like you would when you'd use these tools to provision a new server instance elsewhere. This works great when you combine it with a Virtual Machine managed through Vagrant. The guest OS is then managed completely via Vagrant and Ansible/Puppet, and the only host OS software you then need is a working Vagrant environment, which can often be installed completely through the OS's package management system.