Most resources discussing testing with Chef deal with unit testing. Unit testing your Chef recipes is a very good idea, but will only get you so far. You can have 100s of passing unit tests and your Chef converges will still fail. Integration testing can greatly increase the confidence you have in your Chef code. In this post, I’ll walk through how we’re currently doing it at Essess.

First, a clarification on Chef testing terms

I didn’t really understand how chefspec unit tests fit into the Chef testing process until I watched Seth Vargo’s talk at a June meetup on it. If you use Chef and haven’t watched it yet, check it out. He broke it down like this:

Unit testing in Chef is intention testing. When you run your chefspec tests, you are only testing whether...

Recently I wrote a Python command line app and had some trouble finding a good example of how to test it using best practices. Some ideas I ran across in my search:

• Use a 3rd party CLI-testing solution like ScriptTest or a framework that includes testing like pyCLI.

I write my other tests with unittest and run them with nose. I don’t think there’s anything special about a CLI that requires the rest of my team to learn YATT (yet another testing tool).

• Use sys.argv, subprocess or some combination of both.

This feels very hacky to me. Writing a Python CLI using sys.argv is a little silly considering the more robust options out there. argparse is in the standard library. 3rd party tools like clint and cliff are frameworks that seem promising. A testing solution that plays to...

So Vagrant is great. If you’re not using it yet, you should check it out. It allows you to develop your applications in the same environment they’ll be running in.

I’ve been using Vagrant and Chef for a little over a year now, but I hadn’t used Ruby much before. I’ve written a lot of Chef cookbooks and Vagrantfiles since then. Writing a multi-VM Vagrantfile is much easier if you lean on Ruby to help you keep them shorter and more readable.

Here’s an example of a Vagrantfile with 3 Ubuntu LTS 12.04 machines:

• clean - A base box, with nothing installed. For experimentation.
• mongo - A MongoDB box, provisioned with chef-solo.
• jenkins - A Jenkins CI box, provisioned with chef-solo.

There are 3 parts to the Vagrantfile.

1: Box definitions

Boxes can be...