The package is not currently in use in production, its proposed for use in mediawiki-vagrant (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/221827/). The server is currently manually deployed to http://searchdata.wmflabs.org serving up the discovery team dashboards.

Annoyingly cpack, which is how this package generates its debs, does not build a source package. The documentation specifically says:

Note: Only binary package are supported. source package do not really make sense since build process is cmake driven.

what's the medium/long term idea? just labs and/or MWV? (see also @yuvipanda's thoughts on the code review, related to this)

I don't think there is any current plan to move this into production, there is no expectation of uptime for dashboards (yet). Puppetizing the setup was mostly to ensure people can easily hack on the dashboards, and to make searchdata.wmflabs.org recreatable.

I'm slightly dubious that a shell script will be any simpler of a solution, the related puppet code is pretty straight forward and handles updates much better. I worry that with something provisioned by a simple shell script the actual configuration of the machine will easily drift from the script that sets it up. Writing the script in such a way that you can re-run it on a provisioned instance to get the latest settings is possible but seems it might be much more error prone.

I'll poke around though and try it out, see if it seems reasonable.

For archive happiness, this was done in T164603 :)