Cookbook Development

This repository contains a number of helpers for chef cookbook development. This predominantly includes:

• Vagrantfile which provides a local Docker instance to be used for converging cookbooks
• rake tasks for use during development
• gem dependencies to use in all cookbooks
• foodcritic rules

This is an opinionated testing setup from Rally Software, it's public for others to use but largely reflects our own development workflow and preferences.

Using in a Cookbook

To use this repository and it's capabilities in a cookbook you need to add it to your Gemfile like this:

gem 'cookbook-development', :git =>
'https://github.com/RallySoftware-cookbooks/cookbook-development'

Run bundle update && bundle install to install the latest version

VagrantFile

The VagrantFile included in this repository will download and start a very small VM running the boot2docker distro which is tuned to be an in-memory docker VM. The box itself is very small (~24 meg) and runs completely in memory.

Since many of our cookbooks use docker for test-kitchen converges, and since using Docker is generally a lot faster, this VM is provided to allow you to use Docker for local development.

If you want to use this VM you simply have to run vagrant up inside this directory. You will see a large # of port forwards being setup, this is because Vagrant forwards all the possible dynamic SSH ports that docker may use. It also forwards port 4243, the default docker API port, for interacting with the kitchen-docker plugin.

Cookbook Docker setup

test-kitchen setup

If you have a cookbook which is already configured for docker it probably has a .kitchen.local.yml file. You will need to modify the socket: parameter in that file to look something like this:

---
driver_plugin: docker
driver_config:
  use_sudo: true
  socket: tcp://localhost:4243
  provision_command:
    - 'curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | bash'
    - 'yum -y install make gcc which bash tar cronie'

platforms:
- name: centos-6.4
  run_list:
  - recipe[tree]

If your cookbook doesn't have a .kitchen.local.yml in it, the above example will probably work provided you modify the run_list to match the name of the cookbook you are testing

Gemfile modification

Currently the kitchen-docker version we use is a fork, pending a pull-request being merged. As such we can't include it directly in cookbook-development and it must be added to each cookbook individually. Edit your Gemfile and add the following:

gem 'kitchen-docker', :github => 'adnichols/kitchen-docker', :ref =>
'docker-ruby-api'

After modifying this run bundle update and bundle install to get the kitchen-docker gem.

Running test-kitchen

Once the above setup is complete, any runs of test-kitchen should use docker. The initial run may take a little longer because it has to run the steps listed in provision_command: (which you can add to, if you have additional dependencies) but any subsequent runs will have the modifications made by those steps in the docker image cache and should be applies instantly.

Rake Tasks

test

This task runs through the full suite of tests avaiable and is the appropriate way to test a cookbook before pushing your changes to github & allowing CI to perform testing

Runs the following tasks:

• knife_test
• foodcritic
• unit
• integration

unit

This task allows you to run everything except integration tests for fast feedback on your changes during development

Runs the following tasks:

• knife_test
• foodcritic
• unit

integration

This task runs only the test-kitchen convergence and integration test suites. It's a little faster than 'rake test', but not much.

Runs the following tasks:

• kitchen:all (run all test-kitchen suites)

release

DEPRECATED: This task should not be used unless you understand why you are using it - all releases are done through CI now

This task used to be how we released cookbook changes, but is not used now that CI performs all releases. As such, this task will throw a warning and in the future will become unavailable.

Runs the following tasks:

• test
• bump
• upload

ci

WARNING: This task is intended to be run only from CI & is dangerous to run outside a CI environment where the state of your local git repository is not pristine.

This task is what Jenkins runs to test & release a cookbook.

Runs the following tasks

• test
• bump
• upload