scripted or command line module installation

Hey folks! Have been using gallery for many years now and am a big fan of this project.

I've been successful running Gallery 3.0.8 and the ldap contrib module with my openldap server at home and have been automating the installation of both of these with Chef. There is just 1 piece that is not working: I still have to login to the gallery3 admin interface to activate the module.

I've tried doing things like diffing mysqldumps before/after activation of the ldap module and applying some of the database changes directly. Manipulations to the 'modules' table to activate the ldap module do seem to work, however simply enabling the module through this table alone is insufficient. Basically when you manually activate the module through the webui it runs some initialization routines which populates some users/views with data specific to the LDAP server and configuration files used. I could simply feed it all the SQL needed for the install using my ldap server values, however that would break for anybody else trying to install with my cookbook.

It doesn't look like index.php has the CLI support for module installation. I also didn't have any success running any of the ldap module's php code through a php interpreter on the CLI. I can't even find anybody who has attempted this on this forum before.

The only method I can visualize that might work is to perform ldap queries to get uids/gids for users/groups and then modify SQL inserted into mysql and just slog through all of the changes the module initialization stuff currently does and try and produce SQL similar to what activation normally does.

Has anybody driven webui config changes like module activations through curl/wget, libwww/Mechanize, or other scripting languages and web related helper modules? Any clues on this? Any other suggestions? Even if its something interactive I might be able to send/expect my way through it.

Thank you.