Test Kitchen is an integration tool for developing and testing infrastructure code and software on isolated target platforms.
What is Test Kitchen?
Test Kitchen is a test harness tool to execute your configured code on one or more platforms in isolation. A driver plugin architecture is used which lets you run your code on various cloud providers and virtualization technologies such as Amazon EC2, Blue Box, CloudStack, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, OpenStack, Vagrant, Docker, LXC containers, and more. Many testing frameworks are already supported out of the box including Bats, shUnit2, RSpec, Serverspec, with others being created weekly.
For Chef workflows, cookbook dependency resolver tools such as Berkshelf and Librarian-Chef are supported or you can simply have a cookbooks/ directory and Test Kitchen will know what to do. Support for Test Kitchen is already included in many Chef community cookbooks such as the MySQL, nginx, Chef Server, and runit cookbooks.
What does it give me?
Test Kitchen has a simple workflow that stresses speed but optimizes for the freshness of your code executing on the remote systems between tests. It has a static, declarative configuration in a .kitchen.yml file at the root of your project. It is designed to execute isolated code run in pristine environments ensuring that no prior state exists. A plugin architecture gives you the freedom to run your code on any cloud, virtualization, or bare metal resources and allows you to write acceptance criteria in whatever framework you desire.
How do I get started?
Adding testing support to your Chef cookbook or project is easy. Assuming you have Ruby 1.9 or higher and Vagrant installed, open a terminal session and type:
$ gem install test-kitchen
$ kitchen init
$ kitchen test
For more comprehensive instructions, check out the Getting Started guide.
