FAQ

These are frequently asked questions or tips that don’t have a better home just yet.

How do I add another driver other than Vagrant?

First check whether the driver is installed in the Ruby environment that runs kitchen. With system Ruby, use gem list. With Chef Workstation, use chef gem list. If your selected Workstation package does not bundle the plugin, install it into that same environment.

~$ gem list kitchen-openstack
~$ chef gem list kitchen-openstack
~$ gem install kitchen-openstack # or chef gem install kitchen-openstack
~$ vi cookbooks/demo/kitchen.yml # wherever your kitchen.yml is for your cookbook

Examples:

Edit the kitchen.yml as appropriate and run kitchen list to verify that everything is working as expected. There is a strong chance that the flavors, or image names are different per driver, so when migrating between drivers be prepared to change these at the very least.

Certain drivers, like kitchen-dokken recommend setting KITCHEN_LOCAL_YAML environment variable to ensure these configs are used when there are multiple in a directory.

How do I update just Test Kitchen if I’m using Chef Workstation?

Due to the nature of how Workstation packages are built, it is not possible to update a gem that is part of the package in place. To get newer component versions, install a newer Workstation build or run Test Kitchen from a separate Ruby environment where you control the gem versions.

How do I change the user to access the instance?

Add/edit the transport section in kitchen.yml, for instance:

transport:
  username: ubuntu

I need to set up a cache or proxy using Vagrant, what are some options for me?

So there are a few things that already exist that sort of cover this in the Test Kitchen world:

the host ENV vars for proxies are automatically passed to instances
Example of using polipo locally
vagrant-cachier

For system-level proxies and local polipo/squid setups, minimal configuration is needed, but you should still update the yum/apt configuration files as necessary. If you use vagrant-cachier, it will be utilized by kitchen-vagrant by default. This behavior is explained in the kitchen-vagrant cachier documentation.