Read Chef attributes within the tests ?

[scalp42]

I'm curious if there's a way to parse a JSON (from test-kitchen) and be able to use it within inspec ?

See this blog post: http://www.hurryupandwait.io/blog/accessing-chef-node-attributes-from-kitchen-tests

TLDR: read test-kitchen data JSON, store it in a variable with Rspec and leverage it later, or pretty much can you use Rspec DSL I guess?

Thanks in advance!

[arlimus]

We will have all that data exposed to everyone who needs it (and much more), but with a cleaner attributes interface in the very near future.

However, in the meantime, Matt's method will still work, with tiny adjustments. When test-kitchen does the converge step and all the data is written to the file, you can access it via inspec. Instead of reading via IO.read and JSON.parse just use native inspec resources.

Using kitchen-inspec repo, in the test/cookbooks/os_prepare/recipes/default.rb add:

ruby_block "Save node attributes" do
  block do
    File.write("/tmp/kitchen_chef_node.json", node.to_json)
  end
end

and then for the test in test/integration/default/os_spec.rb you can now access that:

node = json("/tmp/kitchen_chef_node.json").params

[arlimus]

@mwrock your awesome trick still works 😄

[mwrock]

👍 sweet!

[spuranam]

@mwrock @arlimus @andy-dufour Test-kitchen v1.10.x included in ChefDK 0.15.15 broke this work around. It used works under test-kitchen v1.8.0 included in ChefDK v0.14.25.

I have posted a reproduce able minimal project at https://github.com/spuranam/hello. Any insight how best to solve would be greatly appreciated.

My Chef Environment:
ChefDK 0.15.15
OS: Windows 10
VirtualBox: 5.0.22
Vagrant: 1.8.4

[scalp42]

@spuranam have you looked in /tmp see if the JSON is here and what's the content ?

[spuranam]

@scalp42 i have posted the content of json file here. Below is error i am seeing:

-----> Starting Kitchen (v1.10.0)
-----> Verifying ...
Use C:/Users/spuranam/chef-repo/cookbooks/hello/test/integration/default for testing

------Exception-------
Class: Kitchen::ActionFailed
Message: 1 actions failed.

Failed to complete #verify action: [undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass] on default-leap

Please see .kitchen/logs/kitchen.log for more details
Also try running kitchen diagnose --all for configuration

[jeremymv2]

This can be accomplished via an inspec profile. See #813

[mwrock]

I think this is fixed @spuranam . I just ran verify against your repo and it succeeded. Checking my gem bundle I had:

inspec 0.27.1
kitchen-inspec 0.15.0

I then altered my bundle to use the same versions packaged with 0.15.15:

inspec 0.26.0
kitchen-inspec 0.14.0

This yielded the same failure as yours.

Not sure what the exact fix was but I'd recommend updating those gems and they should be included in the soon to be released chefdk 0.16.

[SolverDude]

@arlimus, you reference above (from March 16) about a 'cleaner attributes interface'...can you give an update on how that's coming, or a reference to the plan?

[dushyant28]

Hi,

I am not able to use this approach.

Fixture cookbook (export_node)

ruby_block "Save node attributes" do
block do
require 'json'
if Dir::exist?('/tmp/kitchen')
IO.write("/tmp/kitchen/chef_node.json", node.to_json)
end
end
end

default_spec.rb:

require 'json'
node = json("/tmp/kitchen/chef_node.json").params

describe file("#{Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]}/asset.json") do
it { should exist }
it { should be_file }
it { should_not be_directory }
its('content') { should match "#{node['a']['b']}" }
end

I am getting an error: "Detected alternative framework tests for inspec
Loaded"

Chef Development Kit Version: 1.1.16

Kindly help

[adbejpauli]

@arlimus

We will have all that data exposed to everyone who needs it (and much more), but with a cleaner attributes interface in the very near future.

I'm excited for this. Any updates here?

Would an inspec chef_node resource type be an option?
I'm a little surprised I haven't seen one yet, but maybe there's a reason for that.

[chris-rock]

Since I've just discovered your responses. Please open a new issue if the json loading is not working

[yangpeng-chn]

Does anyone know how to solve the encoding issue below?

chef-client OS: windows 2016

[2020-08-17T14:24:40+09:00] FATAL: Chef::Exceptions::JSON::EncodeError: ruby_block[save node attributes] (mlj_save_attributes_cb::default line 22) had an error: Chef::Exceptions::JSON::EncodeError: Invalid UTF-8 string '・ｽ・ｽ・ｽ・ｽ (・ｽW・ｽ・ｽ・ｽ・ｽ)': cannot encode to UTF-8

Code used:

ruby_block "Save node attributes" do
  block do
    File.write("/tmp/kitchen_chef_node.json", node.to_json)
  end
end

[Schwad]

Hey @yangpeng-chn - great question! Unfortunately we do not track closed issues - could you file your question in a new issue?