kitchen console

Starts an interactive Ruby console with your Test Kitchen configuration loaded. It is a tool for plugin authors and for debugging configuration that resists explanation by other means.

kitchen console

What is available

The console exposes the loaded Kitchen::Config object, so you can inspect instances and their plugins directly:

# every instance Test Kitchen knows about
@config.instances.map(&:name)

# one instance
instance = @config.instances.get("default-ubuntu-2204")

# the plugin objects for that instance
instance.driver
instance.provisioner
instance.transport
instance.verifier

# the computed diagnostic hash, the same data `kitchen diagnose` prints
instance.diagnose

# the driver's resolved configuration
instance.driver.diagnose

When to use it

Most configuration questions are better answered by kitchen diagnose, which prints the same information as YAML without requiring you to know the object model. Reach for the console when you need to go further than a static dump:

• you are writing a plugin and want to call its methods against real configuration
• you want to test how a driver responds to a particular state
• you are tracing why a configuration value resolves the way it does, one method call at a time