kitchen exec

Runs a single command on one or more instances over their configured transport and prints the output. Where kitchen login gives you an interactive session on one machine, kitchen exec runs one non-interactive command across many.

kitchen exec [INSTANCE|REGEXP|all] -c REMOTE_COMMAND

Examples

kitchen exec default-ubuntu-2204 -c "uptime"
kitchen exec all -c "cat /etc/os-release"
kitchen exec ubuntu -c "systemctl is-active nginx"
kitchen exec all -c "df -h /"

Flags

Quoting

The command is passed to the remote shell, so quote it as a single argument and remember that your local shell expands things first:

kitchen exec all -c "echo $HOME"    # expands locally, before sending
kitchen exec all -c 'echo $HOME'    # expands on the instance

Single quotes are usually what you want when the command references remote environment variables.

Running across a matrix

kitchen exec accepts the same instance targeting as every other subcommand, which makes it a quick way to compare state across platforms:

# what kernel is each platform running?
kitchen exec all -c "uname -r"

# is the service up everywhere?
kitchen exec all -c "systemctl is-active nginx"

# confirm a package version across the matrix
kitchen exec all -c "nginx -v"

This is often faster than logging into each instance in turn, and the output is labelled per instance.

When to use it instead of a test

kitchen exec is for exploration, not verification. It has no assertions and does not fail a build when the answer is wrong — it just prints what the command returned. Once you know what to check, move the check into your verifier so it runs every time:

# test/integration/default/nginx_test.rb
describe service('nginx') do
  it { should be_running }
end

kitchen exec windows -c "Get-Service W3SVC"