[chef] Re: Chef CI Pipeline

[AJ Christensen < >]

chefspec and chef-minitest are both viable for this, but both require
#2 while delivering #1/#3

Cheers,

--AJ

On 11 May 2012 09:40, Dan Adams 
<
 >
 wrote:
> 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