[chef] chef-solo + cookbooks development

[Sébastien Nicouleaud < >]

I want to develop cookbooks and test them in virtualbox before using
them in production.

Having to upload my cookbooks to the chef server and run chef-client
from virtualbox everytime I make a little change seems like overkill...

So I clone my chef repository in virtualbox, write a solo.rb file to
make my cookbooks_path point to the cookbooks dir of my repository, and
a solo.json file to make it use my recipe.

But when I run chef-solo, it says my cookbook is not found. I suppose it
has something to do with the metadata.json file of my cookbook not being
generated.

So I try to generate the metadata using the knife cookbook metadata
subcommand, but knife now complains about the chef server authentication
(which I didn't set up since I wanted to use chef-solo).

So, my question is: is there a way to develop and test cookbooks locally
without any chef server ?
Or am I missing something ?

Seb