I’ve posted a few times on the topic of Habitat. I feel its the most promising solution for software package management, and deployment available today. If I have managed to help sway you, and thus you’re interested in adopting Habitat, you may find yourself faced with a relatively daunting task. Migrating a working, functional system from one underlying layer to another is risky, potentially disruptive, and time consuming. All these reasons are why successful financial and enterprise businesses tend to have a slow rate of change.

This post has been a long time coming. For about 2 years, configuration plans (Also known as wrapper plans) have been a critical part of how I use and deploy Habitat plans/artifacts in the wild. They’re a super easy way to encapsulate some required software and bundle your own configuration. For some reason, finding information about this approach has previously been difficult due to a lack of documentation. Here’s an example of configuration plans for Habitat.