any way to use puppet or chef without launching daemons?

Solution 1:

You can run puppet <file>.pp if you just want to apply a single manifest locally. This said, if you've got a small number of servers to manage, a single puppetmasterd isn't going to be a huge inconvenience.

Solution 2:

As rodjek notes, you can execute single manifests using the command puppet. But by not having puppetmasterd take care of the compile process you're cutting out a whole bunch of the good magic associated with module organisation and autoloading. Not to mention having to manually distribute your manifests.

From your question, it sounds like you may be more worried about the footprint of the client than the server. It is worth noting you don't have to run puppetd in daemon mode and some people, myself included, prefer to call it periodically from cron with the options --onetime --no-daemonize. You could choose to call this as often or not as you wish.