Installing

This quick start guide is designed for users with little or no experience with Chef Infra or Ruby. It will walk you through creating a Chef Infra cookbook and introduce automated testing as a standard practice. Before we begin, let’s make sure you have the necessary tools installed.

Pre-requisites

• 64 bit operating system
• CPU Virtualization enabled

To run 64-bit virtual machines, your computer must have a 64-bit operating system and a processor that supports hardware virtualization. These virtualization features—Intel VT-x for Intel CPUs or AMD-V for AMD CPUs—must be enabled in your system’s BIOS or EFI settings. Most modern processors include these extensions, but they may be disabled by default, so check your system documentation if you’re unsure.

Test Kitchen and Workstation tooling

Install Test Kitchen from RubyGems, your system packages, Cinc Workstation, or Chef Workstation. Test Kitchen itself does not bundle Chef or Cinc tooling. When you use a Workstation package, the available drivers, provisioners, verifiers, and Chef-compatible commands are the ones bundled by that package.

For a RubyGems install:

$ gem install test-kitchen
$ kitchen version
Test Kitchen version 4.0.0

For a Workstation install, use the Workstation command to see what it bundles:

$ chef --version

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a popular open-source hypervisor that enables you to run multiple virtual machines on your local system. To get started, download and install the correct version for your operating system from the VirtualBox Downloads page. After installation, confirm that VirtualBox is correctly set up and its command-line tools are available in your $PATH by running:

$ VBoxManage --version
7.1.8r168469

Vagrant

Vagrant acts as a wrapper for hypervisors like VirtualBox, simplifying the process of creating, configuring, and sharing reproducible development environments. It uses pre-built virtual machine images called “boxes” to quickly spin up environments. To get started, download and install the correct Vagrant package for your operating system from the Vagrant Downloads page.

$ vagrant --version
Vagrant 2.4.7

With Test Kitchen, VirtualBox, and Vagrant installed, you’re ready to create a local virtual machine. By default, kitchen init generates a kitchen-vagrant driver configuration and a shell provisioner. This guide uses Vagrant with VirtualBox for virtualization, and a Chef-compatible Workstation environment for the Chef Infra examples.

Test Kitchen is highly modular, allowing you to mix and match drivers (such as Vagrant, VMware, Azure, EC2, or Docker), provisioners (such as shell, Chef/Cinc, Ansible, Puppet, Salt, or DSC), and verifiers (including InSpec, Serverspec, or BATS). Install those plugins into the same Ruby environment that runs kitchen.