kitchen setup

Prepares one or more instances for verification by installing whatever the configured verifier needs on the instance.

kitchen setup [INSTANCE|REGEXP|all]

If the instance does not exist or has not been converged, setup performs those actions first.

Flags

Flag Alias Description
--concurrency [N] -c Set up matching instances concurrently. Unlimited when no number is given.
--fail-fast -f Stop as soon as one instance fails.
--parallel -p Deprecated. Use --concurrency.
--test-base-path PATH -t Set the base path for tests.
--log-level LEVEL -l debug, info, warn, error, or fatal.
--log-overwrite Set to false to keep old log files.
--color Toggle color output.

When you need it

Rarely. kitchen verify runs setup automatically, and the modern InSpec verifier does most of its work from the workstation rather than by installing software on the instance, so setup is often a no-op.

It remains a distinct lifecycle state because verifiers such as Busser-based serverspec do need to install a test harness and its dependencies onto the instance. Running setup on its own is useful when you want to pay that installation cost once — for example, priming an instance before running kitchen verify repeatedly against it.