[chef] cookbook recipe template development and unit testing?

[Jesse Campbell < >]

Good day!
I've been searching about and can't find the answers I seek... web searches for cookbook recipe testing seem to be mostly, um, food-related :]

I'm in the process of replacing my home-brew templating system with chef server and recipes with templates.

In my system, I can just run "perl templater.pl <template_file> -- <custom template arguments>" and it will take in the custom args and feed them back to the template, spitting out the result of the template to stdout. It is great for testing small template file changes before pushing them out to the server.

How can I do this with chef? There is a defaults.rb for all of the default attribute values, which should be enough to generate a template... is there a way to say "chef-solo cookbooktest /path/to/mycookbook --outputdir /tmp" or something to that effect?

Thanks,
-Jesse Campbell