Systems and methods are provided for automated and distributed configuration of platform deployments on remote computing devices, such as laptop computers. The platform deployments can include services that mirror that of a server-based platform deployment. A centralized entity be used to generate and/or edit a single configuration file that contains multiple subset configuration files, each corresponding to a service to be deployed to each of the remote computing devices. The configuration file can be customized for the remote computing devices. Additionally, interaction between services can be achieved by using a templating language that allows certain aspects of the configuration file to include references to values.