Kitchen is an alternative to the default chef-server. It allows you to manage your infrastructure with more of a git workflow over the default workflow focused on versioning recipes.
Kitchen is targeting Chef 0.10, as it introduces several API changes as well as the concept of "environments".
Kitchen was born out of a realization that the traditional chef-server didn't fit the type of workflow I wanted.
- I wanted to version my infrastructure instead of individual cookbooks.
- Changes often cross several cookbooks and are interdependent.
- We maintain several different environments, some of which are ahead of production in their infrastructure for testing/development.
- We'll be developing major infrastructure changes in a branch of our chef repo while still supporting the existing infrastructure in another.
We aimed to solve these problems by:
- Having kitchen work directly off our repository of cookbooks/roles.
- Rather than using knife to upload changes, we just commit and push that branch
- We switch environments, roles, or individual nodes to use different branches.
Kitchen is very very much ALPHA. At best, it is a semi-working prototype.
It is under active development, but still very rough under the edges. Right now is is simply a prototype. A lot of the code is still pretty ugly in parts, as it was focused on "what do I gotta do to make this sort of work". Refinement and actual specs are coming soon.
As Chef 0.10 is still just a beta, it may also be changing as well.
- Fork the project.
- Make your feature addition or bug fix.
- Add tests for it. This is important.
- Commit, do not mess with Rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
- Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.
Copyright (c) 2011 Ken Robertson. See LICENSE for details.