Test Kitchen

What is Kitchen

• Kitchen is a test harness tool to execute Infrastructure as Code(IaC) on one or more platforms
• To execute in multiple platforms kitchen have a driver plugin architecture.

Using Kitchen in Chef

Without Kitchen

• Cookbook Development Cycle Consists of following steps
  • Write Chef Code
  • Upload the code to the server using berks
  • Wait for Convergence on the node or run chef-client
  • Verify if the code written is working
• Problems with this approach
  • Need to upload every version to the cookbook, which is untested
  • This might lead to some non working versions
  • Process is bit more lengthy

With Kitchen

• Cookbook development cycle consists of the following steps
  • Write Chef code
  • Verify the written code with test kitchen
  • Upload the code to the chef server using berks
  • Wait for Convergence on the node or run chef-client

Setup Workstation

Lets look at different environments using different drivers

AWS Driver for Linux

• Prerequisites:
  • SSH Client: Git or Putty
  • IDE: Visual Studio Code with Chef Extension
  • ChefDk installed
• Generate cookbook on the workstation

  chef generate cookbook apache_cookbook
  cd apache_cookbook
  

• AWS Preparation
  • Create IAM user with at least EC2 permissions (In this demonstration i would create user with Admin permissions).
    • refer here
    • refer here for image demonstration
  • Authenticate Test Kitchen with AWS
    • refer here for details
    • If your workstation is
      • Linux or mac: Navigate to file at ~/.aws/credentials
      • Windows: Navigate to file at %USERPROFILE%.aws\credentials
    • Enter ACCESS_KEY from the iam user to aws_access_key_id and Secret key to aws_secret_access_key
    • Other way is to use the aws cli command

    aws configure
    

  • Make the note of the following id’s
    • region: us-west-2
    • availability zone: us-west-2a
    • vpc-id: Can be noted from console or use the following commands of aws cli

    aws ec2 describe-vpcs
    

    • subnet-id: Can be noted from console or use the following commands of aws cli

    aws ec2 describe-subnets --filters "Name=availability-zone,Values=us-west-2b"
    

    • Create a security group with ports 22,80,443 opened and make a note of security group name or id.
    • Image-id: ami-08692d171e3cf02d6
    • Key-Pair: Create a new key pair & make note of name
  • Kitchen command overview:
  • Configure Cookbook with AWS driver:
    • open apache_cookbook folder with visual studio code
    • Navigate to file .kitchen.yml
    • Edit the file with the details as shown below

---
driver:
    name: ec2
    aws_ssh_key_id: test # key pair name
    region: us-west-2 # region code of aws
    availability_zone: us-west-2b # availability_zone of us-west
    subnet_id: subnet-89fb32ee # subnet-id noted from above steps
    instance_type: t2.micro # as it is free instance type
    image_id: ami-08692d171e3cf02d6 # image id of ubuntu
    security_group_ids: ["sg-0caf47d86b61769cb"]


provisioner:
    name: chef_zero
    # You may wish to disable always updating cookbooks in CI or other testing environments.
    # For example:
    #   always_update_cookbooks: <%= !ENV['CI'] %>
    always_update_cookbooks: true

verifier:
    name: inspec

transport:
    ssh_key: ./test.pem # relative path to pem file
    connection_timeout: 10
    connection_retries: 5
    username: ubuntu # username from ami-id

platforms:
- name: ubuntu-18.04

suites:
- name: default
    run_list:
    - recipe[apache_cookbook::default]
    verifier:
    inspec_tests:
        - test/integration/default
    attributes:

    * For more info refer [here](https://docs.chef.io/config_yml_kitchen.html)
    * write simple resource in recipe default.rb
    ```
    file '/home/ubuntu/readme.txt' do
        content 'created by chef'
        action :create
    end
    ```
    * Execute Kitchen commands to test
    ```
    kitchen list
    kitchen create
    kitchen list
    kitchen converge
    ```
    * Now login into the ec2 machine & verify
    ```
    kitchen login
    cat /home/ubuntu/readme.txt
    ```
    * Once you finish your testing you can continue updating cookbooks & converge.
    * Destroy the created ec2 machine using
    ```
    kitchen destroy
    ```