Wizard is the next-generation autoinstall management system. It is currently being developed as an in-house tool for scripts.mit.edu, with a focus on automating the upgrading process using a Git backend.
Ultimately, we would like to see Wizard become a general purpose web application package manager, with first class support for a variety of applications under a homogenous interface.
Components of Wizard depend on packages and special configuration found on scripts servers. As such, the best way to test Wizard is to SSH into a scripts server:
ssh scripts.mit.edu
wizard help
Individual tools that are not scripts-specific, such as wizard upgrade or wizard install, can be run locally with Python 2.6 and a reasonably new version of Git.
The canonical source of the Wizard source code is the directory /mit/scripts/git/wizard.git on AFS.
The live version of the source code lives at /mit/scripts/wizard and should be periodically updated as necessary (use the pull.sh script; you will need scripts-root bits to do so). Documentation lives in /mit/scripts/web_scripts/home/wizard; the post-merge hook on this Git repository should perform the appropriate rebuild.
Certain commands must be run as root on not-backward.mit.edu due to our restrictive security policies. This machine maintains its own copy of Wizard at /wizard. If you make local changes to this copy and would like to push them back to the core repository, you should push to a system:scripts-security-upd writable directory in your home directory, and then on a trusted machine perform the push to the canonical repository.