We run our CI on LXD containers, and we pre-bake all the tools and packages with Packer
The plugin is pretty good. We use it all the time, but it needs some love from some Go programmers.
I’m a big fan of Bolt, obvs. But note that it is not a “desired state” system like Ansible (or regular Puppet). It is more like a “framework for scripts”. I was fascinated by the approach and my team has found it useful. If you do want to get into Bolt, be sure to join the Puppet Community Slack.
This is an LXD-adjacent issue I’d love to see addressed in Bolt soon Allow specifying transport config (e.g. LXD remote) at the command line · Issue #3053 · puppetlabs/bolt · GitHub