Testing Chef roles and environments

Question

I'm new to Chef and have been using Test Kitchen to test the validity of my cookbooks, which works great. Now I'm trying to ensure that environment-specific attributes are correct on production nodes prior to running Chef initially. These would be defined in a role.

For example, I may have recipes that converge using a Vagrant box with dev settings, which validates the cookbook. I want to be able to test that a production node's role. I think I want these tests as the source of truth describing my environment. Looking at Test Kitchen's documentation, this seems beyond its scope.

Is my assumption correct? Is there a better approach to test a cookbook before the first time Chef is run on a production node to ensure it has the correct settings?

Answer 1

I pleasantly discovered that chef_zero uses the "test/integration" directory as it's chef repository.

Just create your roles under

• test/integration/roles

Example

Standard Chef cookbook layout.

├── attributes
│   └── default.rb
├── Berksfile
├── Berksfile.lock
├── chefignore
├── .kitchen.yml
├── metadata.rb
├── README.md
├── recipes
│   └── default.rb
└── test
    └── integration
        ├── default
        │   └── serverspec
        │       ├── default_spec.rb
        │       └── spec_helper.rb
        └── roles
            └── demo.json

.kitchen.yml

---
driver:
  name: vagrant

provisioner:
  name: chef_zero

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-14.04

suites:
  - name: default
    run_list:
      - role[demo]
    attributes:

Notes:

• Provisioner is chef_zero
• The runlist is configured to use a role

recipes/default.rb

file "/opt/helloworld.txt" do
  content "#{node['demo']['greeting']}"
end

attributes/default.rb

default['demo']['greeting'] = "hello world"

Notes:

• Cookbook won't compile without a default

test/integration/default/serverspec/default_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'

describe file('/opt/helloworld.txt') do

  it { should be_file }
  its(:content) { should match /this came from my role/ }

end

Notes:

• Integration test is looking for the content that is set by the role attribute

test/integration/roles/demo.json

{
  "name": "demo",
  "default_attributes": {
    "demo": {
      "greeting": "this came from my role"
    }
  },
  "run_list": [
    "recipe[demo]"
  ]
}