[chef] Re: Re: Re: Strainer vs Rake

[Ranjib Dey < >]

we use a single repo for all our cookbooks (in site-cookbooks directory), and we also use lots of community cookbooks (managed by berkshelf). we use only rake ( rake rubocop, rake foodcritic, rake spec, rake cucumber). We also use chefspec (in fact chefspec, rubocop, foodcritic are the only tests we run locally) against our wrapper cookbooks. Most of the wrapper cookbooks uses search, databags etc.

if you are maintaining lot of independent cookbooks, strainer might be a good solution, as the whole test process takes less time and independent. while for us, testing means unit testing in isolation (but against a set of cookbooks) and integration testing as whole (which is time consuming). A popular way to address this is by offloading the whole thing in CI server and breaking them down into individual stages , establish dependencies etc. this enables faster feedback (like dont run specs if lint fails, or dont deploy if integration test fails etc), and for this, rake was more suitable for us (independent tasks, semantically same as any other ruby projects, rake tasks are pre-baked in almost all ruby tools etc). 

again, if you plan to take the individual repo per cookbook, strainer can be very useful.

also, given strainer is fairly light weight (and ships its own rake tasks), you can always keep both and see how it works,

regards

ranjib

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Josiah Kiehl < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Many people do not put their cookbooks in chef-repo, opting to create a new repository for each cookbook like the opscode-cookbooks organization on GitHub, and use Chef Spec to test their cookbooks: https://github.com/sethvargo/chefspec

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 6:19 AM, Stewart, Curtis < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I just wanted to bump this thread to see if there were any new thoughts.

Curtis

On Apr 15, 2014, at 11:56 AM, Stewart, Curtis < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

We’re currently working with a chef-repo and I’m wondering what the better solution is, using a Rake or Strainer for testing.

I’m aware that cookbook-repo’s are preferred, but we’re unable to go that route at this time.

Possible options:

• Repo-level Rakefile
• Individual Rakefiles per cookbook directory
• Both repo-level (global testing) and cookbook-level (single cookbook tests) Rakefiles
• Repo-level Strainerfile
• Individual Strainerfiles per cookbook directory

I can see advantages for each, wondering what other’s thoughts/preferences/experiences are.

Additional comments/thoughts:

• Strainer provides complete isolation by copying a cookbook to a $SANDBOX directory.
• Repo-level Rakefile would run all tests (including running specs in parallel with parallel_specs)

Thanks!

Curtis