[chef] Chef CI Pipeline


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Dan Adams < >
  • To: < >
  • Subject: [chef] Chef CI Pipeline
  • Date: Thu, 10 May 2012 22:40:40 +0100
  • Mail-reply-to: < >

Hi

I have been looking into options for creating a CI (continuous integration) pipeline for my Chef configuration. My CI server of choice is Jenkins, and I currently have a pipeline that looks like:

ruby syntax check -> ruby lint check -> chef syntax check -> chef lint check

using the toolchain:

"ruby -c" -> "nitpick" -> "knife cookbook test" -> "foodcritic"

This gives me a pipeline that runs in under 1 minute for a relatively large repo, which is fast enough not to make people want to skip the process, and catches a lot of silly problems early.

However, there's still a lot of problems of one sort or another that pass this chain but fail in one way or another in production. I'm looking for a programmatic way to prevent these additional problems by tagging something on to the end of my existing pipeline. Something where unit or integration testing might sit in a traditional CI pipeline.

[I know that a lot of people use vagrant, VMTH or toft or some other system to spin up a temporary VM or set of VMs at the end of their CI chain in order to prove the recipes in the role that traditionally would be filled by integration testing. However, for environmental reasons, this is not an option for me and I'd like to ignore that option as a solution for the purposes of this discussion to save getting sidetracked please.]

What I'm looking for basically is something that:
1) provides near to or the same level of understanding as the chef server API as to whether your chef config is sane
2) Ideally something drop-in that doesn't require writing individual tests for each new cookbook/recipe (a la cucumber-chef)
3) It must also be fast, under 1 minute to test a chef repo containing hundreds of nodes and hundreds of cookbooks

I have no experience with it but it looks as though chefspec (http://acrmp.github.com/chefspec/) might match at least requirement (1). Any other suggestions for investigation?

Cheers

Dan



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