Hi everyone,
first, my two cents on the main idea of the thread:
In my opinion, Foreman itself is mainly designed and meant to deploy, manage and lifecycle standardized types of hosts. With the concept of hostgroups, we have some quite mighty tool already there define these standardized types.
I do like the idea of deploying a whole set of hosts based on some parameters, but I do dislike the approach you took there (at least from a Foreman perspective).
a) This should really use the abstractions Foreman already provides us with, like hostgroups, compute resources and compute profiles, etc.
b) I can not really see where this adresses the underlying issue of having to set up a myriad of things before beeing able to deploy the first host.
c) Like @mason already wrote, this could (probably, I’ve never tried it) be done quite well by other tools that are specialized on orchestrationg whole infrastructures instead of single hosts. I could imagine this to be a somewhat decent idea for a plugin though, since not everybode will want to set up and maintain another tool for that since if they do not need it for anything else. I just cannot see this as a feature in vanilla Foreman because it aims somewhere else (or rather, beyond) than Foreman.
To adress the underlying issue:
The main problem adressed here is that installing Foreman and getting it up and running is quite some task to handle and can easily becomm a lot of pain and slamming your head agains walls/monitors. Lately I have seen a lot of people bringing that up, and the first solutions currently beeing worked on (e.g. here, another thread about that topic that just poped up today. Sadly had no time to give it a complete read by now). I have also thought about building a script to set up quick test-and-throw-away instances, but never found the time to do so. Once I actually find the time, I will be sure to give your script a look, but without trying it out I can’t help you in getting it to work. On a quick scan, it looks like all the basics are there though. But actually, I don’t think that should be discussed here any further since it is at least somewhat off topic. You can still open a thread of your own though 