Testing chef cookbooks with Test Kitchen

• Test Kitchen is a test harness tool to verify/execute the infrastructure as code on one or more platforms

• Terms:

  • Driver: Is used to choose the virtualization platform where infra can be created to test cookbooks
  • Driver Plugin: Test kitchen uses driver plugin architecture to run chef cookbooks on cloud providers and virtualization platforms such as Vagrant, Amazon Ec2, Azure, Google Compute Engine, Docker.
  • Test Frameworks: chef cookbooks can be tested by writing tests using Chef Inspec.

• Refer Here for direct devops articles on using test kitchen

• Refer Here for official docs

• Along with chefdk the kitchen will be installed on your workstation

• Now execute the following commands

kitchen --help

• Lets create a new cookbook "kitchenawsdemo" with aws driver Refer Here

chef generate cookbook -b kitchenawsdemo

• In the generated cookbook we will have kitchen.yml file. It would have
  • driver: where the tests are supposed to be executed
  • provisioner: chef_zero
  • verifier: which test framework should be used to verify cookbook
  • platforms: different operating systems where you want to execute your cookbook
  • suites: These are your test cases
• To know more about kitchen.yaml Refer Here
• The default kitchen.yml file generated will have a vagrant driver configured, but we would like to use aws driver
• For writing yaml of kitchen Refer Docs from here
• Kitchen.yaml written is

---
driver:
  name: ec2
  aws_ssh_key_id: "terraform"
  security_group_ids: ["sg-05bdbb36ca7c53403"]
  region: "us-west-2"
  availability_zone: "c"
  subnet_id: "subnet-f38757ae"
  instance_type: "t2.micro"
  associate_public_ip: true

transport:
  ssh_key: "./terraform.pem"
  username: "ubuntu"
  

## The forwarded_port port feature lets you connect to ports on the VM guest via
## localhost on the host.
## see also: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/networking/forwarded_ports.html

#  network:
#    - ["forwarded_port", {guest: 80, host: 8080}]

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

  ## product_name and product_version specifies a specific Chef product and version to install.
  ## see the Chef documentation for more details: https://docs.chef.io/config_yml_kitchen.html
  #  product_name: chef
  #  product_version: 15

verifier:
  name: inspec

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-18.04
    driver:
      image_id: "ami-0a634ae95e11c6f91"
  #- name: centos-7

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

• Lets execute the following commands

berks install
kitchen list

• Now lets create a new recipe called as utils and write resources to install git, tree

#
# Cookbook:: .
# Recipe:: utils
#
# Copyright:: 2020, The Authors, All Rights Reserved.

if platform?('ubuntu')
    apt_update 'update packages' do
        ignore_failure true
        action :update
    end
end

utilities = %w(git tree nano)
package utilities do
    action :install
end

    

• Call this recipe from default.rb

include_recipe 'kitchenawsdemo::utils'

• To test this cookbook which we have written, lets execute the following commands

kitchen converge

• To manually verify if the recipe has done its job or not
• Now lets verify the same cookbook on redhat 8, so make changes in kitchen.yaml

---
driver:
  name: ec2
  aws_ssh_key_id: "terraform"
  security_group_ids: ["sg-05bdbb36ca7c53403"]
  region: "us-west-2"
  availability_zone: "c"
  subnet_id: "subnet-f38757ae"
  instance_type: "t2.micro"
  associate_public_ip: true

transport:
  ssh_key: "./terraform.pem"
  


## The forwarded_port port feature lets you connect to ports on the VM guest via
## localhost on the host.
## see also: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/networking/forwarded_ports.html

#  network:
#    - ["forwarded_port", {guest: 80, host: 8080}]

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

  ## product_name and product_version specifies a specific Chef product and version to install.
  ## see the Chef documentation for more details: https://docs.chef.io/config_yml_kitchen.html
  #  product_name: chef
  #  product_version: 15

verifier:
  name: inspec

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-18.04
    driver:
      image_id: "ami-0a634ae95e11c6f91"
    transport:
      username: "ubuntu"
  - name: redhat-8
    driver:
      image_id: ami-02f147dfb8be58a10
    transport:
      username: "ec2-user"
    

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

• Now execute the command kitchen converge and wait for the command to completed

• So from kitchen i can write cookbooks & verify them on different platforms

• Now execute kitchen list

• Execute kitchen destroy to remove the machines created