[chef] debugging chef-solo in chef-shell

[Igor Serebryany < >]

Hi Chefs, 

I'm trying to debug a cookbook in chef-shell but I'm running into problems. 

I start chef-shell in solo mode with 'chef-shell -s -j myattr.json'. When I try to expand the runlist (as instructed here, using 'node.run_list.expand('production')', chef-shell still tries to talk to a chef server. It complains about missing client.pem, and after I created a reasonable-looking file at the right location it still says 'ERROR: Connection refused connecting to localhost:4000'.

Is there a way to tell chef-shell to avoid trying to talk to any sort of server? Is this a bug? This is on chef 11.4.0.

Thanks,

--Igor