The Puppetfile is a very good format to describe which modules you wish to include in your environment. Building upon the Puppetfile is another tool, r10k. r10k is a total environment management tool. You can use r10k to clone a local Git repository into your environmentpath and then place the modules specified in your Puppetfile into that directory. The local Git repository is known as the master repository; it is where r10k expects to find your Puppetfile. r10k also understands Puppet environments and will clone Git branches into subdirectories of your environmentpath, simplifying the deployment of multiple environments. What makes r10k particularly useful is its use of a local cache directory to speed up deployments. Using a configuration file, r10k.yaml, you can specify where to store this cache and also where your master repository is held.