kitchen.yml

Let’s take a closer look at the kitchen.yml file. Although kitchen init generates an initial version for you, it’s important to review and customize this file to suit your testing needs.

Suppose you want to test your Chef or Cinc cookbook exclusively on Ubuntu 24.04 using the latest compatible client from your selected Workstation or system Ruby environment. In this scenario, you can update the kitchen.yml file to specify the desired provisioner and limit the platforms section to just one entry, as shown below:

---
driver:
  name: vagrant

provisioner:
  name: chef_infra

verifier:
  name: inspec

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-24.04

suites:
  - name: default
    verifier:
      inspec_tests:
        - test/integration/default
    attributes:

To see the results of our work, let’s run the kitchen list subcommand:

$ kitchen list
Instance             Driver   Provisioner  Verifier  Transport  Last Action    Last Error
default-ubuntu-2404  Vagrant  ChefInfra     Inspec    Ssh        <Not Created>  <None>

Let’s talk about what an instance is and how kitchen interacts with these.