[chef] Some Questions

[Martin Eigenbrodt < >]

Hi everrybody,

I'm currently digging into Chef and have some questions regarding the Idea to 
have
"Infrastructure as Code".

1) As I understand Cookbooks should be maintained in VCS. But it is still 
possible
 to locally modify a cookbook on a developers machine and upload it
to the chef server, thus applying changes not present in any version control. 
How do you handle this situation?
 I could think of two measurement to solve this: a) Change 'knife cookbook 
upload' to only accept cookbooks not changed against the git/svn.
 b) Do not ever upload changeds directly, but commit them and let a CI server 
apply them to a chef server (and maybe run some tests?). Is anybody doing 
like that? Am I getting things totaly wrong?

2)  How are changes to attributes tracked? As far as I understand there ist 
nothingh that keeps track of changes to attributes. So I can not my 
infrastructure as it was as at a certain time.

3)  I've played around with some recipes and often succeeded to upload recipe 
and/or attribute files to my chef server that were syntactically wrong, 
atlhough there seems to be some validation done during 'knife cookbook 
upload'. Is there a way to get a stronger validation for my files before 
uploading them?

4)  Is there a way to download cookooks from a side including dependencies?

5)  Is there any standard way to run automated tests against your cookbooks?

Thanks and Best Regards,

Martin