Learning Chef

Chapter 16. Testing

In this final chapter of the book, we will cover how to test your Chef automation code. It is important to perform testing and verification steps before deploying your Chef code to production to ensure it works as intended.

In nearly all the exercises in this book, we’ve taken care to add sections highlighting how to manually verify that your Chef code is working properly. In this chapter, we’ll show you how to automate this process.

Testing Rationale

Using a configuration management tool like Chef gets you 50% of the way there in automating testing and verification. Because Chef automates infrastructure in a repeatable manner, it inherently makes apps running in these environments more testable. This is why we introduced Test Kitchen so early in the book, in Chapter 5, so that you could see this in action. Throughout the book, you’ve deployed your Chef code to a local development sandbox environment. Using Test Kitchen should give you confidence that if you deployed the same code to a production Chef environment, it will behave in the same manner.

The other 50% of the testing rationale, besides using Chef in the first place, is to be strategic when testing and deploying automation code. Just as it is best to introduce change to application code in small batches, it is also best to introduce change to your infrastructure in small batches. As Figure 16-1 shows, you should work in short bursts, performing a short build-test-deploy cycle. This approach can ...