[chef] Infrastructure Testing

[Jamie van Dyke < >]

Hi all,

I've been beating myself up over the last few days trying to figure out the best way of testing our build automation.  I've played with cucumber-chef, minitest_handler, rspec-chef and more.  All of them were either broken in implementation or theory.  Here are my thoughts:

Cucumber-chef
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I fought for 2 days with the gem trying to get it to work, and after multiple gem incompatibilities I thought I had it sorted.  Until I got to the part where it builds an EC2 instance, which then failed miserably as well.  In the end I dumped it because if it's this hard to get running initially, how can I trust it to continue to work in the future without another 2+ days worth of headaches.  In theory this was probably what I want, but over-complicated and brittle.

Rspec-chef
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I've possibly misunderstood the concept behind this one, but it looks like it's testing that I've written the correct pieces in my recipes rather than my infrastructure has turned out correctly after a run.

Minitest-Handler
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There are 2 variants on this idea, 1 is strictly for chef-solo and the other is for chef-client.  I don't run chef-solo so I opted to try out the cookbook_file based method that was recently discussed on the mailing list (http://lists.opscode.com/sympa/arc/chef/2012-03/msg00000.html).  I'm struggling to understand why you'd follow this method.  Here's why:  A cookbook is generic and can be passed around between users/environments, for example the 'generic-users' cookbook.  To add a files/default/tests/minitest/moo_test.rb to this cookbook and upload it, means I've just made that test specific to my environment but included it within a generic cookbook.  It's completely possible that I've not grasped the methodology on this, but it seems fundamentally wrong because the 2 should be separate.

What I'm looking for is something as simple as this workflow, and if it comes to light that nobody else has done this and I need to write my won then I'm happy to do so:

1 - I write my infrastructure test, describing what change I am about to implement
2 - I run my test suite
 a - a vagrant/ec2/heroku/whatever instance is started
 b - chef-client is run on that server as I would expect in production
 c - my test suite looks to see if changes I want are in place
 d - it fails
3 - I write my cookbook changes to implement the small change I want
4 - is our test instance running?
 a - no, GOTO 2a
 b - yes, GOTO 2b
5 - did it pass?
 a - yes, GOTO 1
 b - no, GOTO 3


I would expect my test suite to simply describe what should and should not be in place, running, or open.  Have I completely missed the boat here and this already exists in a nice simple structure, or are we at the stage in Chef specific DevOps where we need to write something that fulfils this?

To be clear, I would expect such a tool to have a generic 'setup' step that isn't automatic and needs a little work.  Something like 'start a vagrant instance with the role X' or similar.  I would also expect to have to write my own 'teardown'.

Again, I must stress that I feel like this si such a simple thing that needs to be in place that I must have missed some vital information I need to get cracking.  Apologies if it comes across as whiney, I'm just frustrated and need to know if I embark on such a project, would I be re-inventing a wheel I missed somewhere.

Cheers
Jamie van Dyke