"build the right thing and the thing right"
An increased focus on testing, continuous integration and agile development is occuring in
software development. This is also influencing configuration tools Chef and Puppet.
We are seeing influential books like Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef, 2nd Edition emerge.
The following tools seem to be becoming well established:
| Test Type | Chef | Puppet |
| Style | Foodcritic | Puppet-lint |
| Unit | Chefspec | Puppet-rspec |
| Integration | Serverspec | Serverspec |
Style and Syntax Testing
Foodcritic and Puppet-lint can quickly test the syntax and style of your cookbooks/modules on your own workstation without writing any tests so this is the easiest testing to do.
Unit Testing
Chefspec and Puppet-rspec are good for regression testing and checking that the cookbooks or modules build what they are suppose to be building. Here you have to write the tests in rspec format but you don't need to have a server and run chef/puppet because it simulates this. But there are limitations so not all features of your cookbook/module can be testing.
To learn chefspec see
chefspec exploration,
chefspec examples,
chefspec doc and
rubydoc
Integration Testing
Once again Serverspec tests need to be written but they are in a similar format to rspec tests. However integration tests are
more time consuming as it requires chef or puppet to be run on a remote server to converge it before running the tests.
Because chef and puppet converge the node you don't need to write tests to prove that chef or puppet works. The tests should be equivalent to what system admin does when they log on to the server and check various files, directory and logs to check all is ok.
To learn serverspec see
Resource Types and
serverspec examples
Test Kitchen
Test Kitchen is fast becoming the standard way to run integration tests for chef as it automatically creates the servers and runs the tests and logs the results. It has a great
Getting Started Tutorial. Puppet support should be available soon too!
Continuous Integration
We are starting to see
continuous integration pipelines being set in systems like Jenkins that automate the test process.
Auditing
Many companies run puppet with the --noop option regularly over the server estate to check the configuration are correct.
EC2Dream facilitates both cookbook development and testing development by supplying a sample repository and:
a. A graphical interface to test kitchen
b. The ability to push a repository and tests to a remote machine and run chef or puppet and the test tools.
Chef References
foodcritic docs
chefspec docs
Outside In TDD with Chefspec
Chef cookbooks development by TDD
Day 11 Lazy Sysadmins Guide to Test Driven Chef Cookbooks
Testing Chef Cookbooks. Part 2. Chefspec
Unit Testing Chef Cookbooks
Chef Recipe Code Coverage
Test-Driven Chef Cookbooks with Test Kitchen
Chef Testing at PagerDuty
Chef Cookbook Testing and Continous Integration
Puppet References
BetterSpecs
Rspec Puppet Tutorial
Automated Puppet Testing
Verifying Puppet: Checking Syntax and Writing Automated Tests
Test Driven Development with Puppet
The Next Generation of Puppet Module Testing
RSpec tests for puppet modules
Puppet Testing Part 1
Testing puppet modules
Puppet modules in Jenkins.
