kitchen create

Starts one or more instances. The driver builds the compute resource — a virtual machine, container, or cloud server — but nothing is configured on it yet.

kitchen create [INSTANCE|REGEXP|all]

Examples

kitchen create                       # every instance
kitchen create default-ubuntu-2204   # one instance
kitchen create ubuntu                # every instance matching /ubuntu/
kitchen create all -c 4              # every instance, four at a time

Flags

When you need it

Most of the time you do not. kitchen converge creates the instance first if it does not exist, so running create by hand is only useful when you want to:

• confirm your driver credentials and networking work before spending time on a converge
• create an instance and then log into it with kitchen login to poke at a clean machine
• warm a set of instances in CI before a fan-out of converges

What gets written

After a successful create, Test Kitchen records the instance’s state — its hostname, port, and username — in .kitchen/<instance-name>.yml. That file is how later commands know how to reach the machine. Deleting it will orphan the running instance: Test Kitchen will no longer know the instance exists, but your cloud provider will keep billing for it.