Setting your environment in test-kitchen

When using test-kitchen it may be necessary to set the environment of your nodes.

You can do with by changing your .kitchen.yml file. In my example, I’ll show it at the root, but they can be set on a per-suite level as well, which is handy to test different environments.

For chef-solo:

driver:
    name: vagrant

provisioner:
    name: chef_solo
    environments_path: test/environments
    solo_rb:
        environment: kitchen
# etc...

For chef-zero:

driver:
    name: vagrant

provisioner:
    name: chef_zero
    environments_path: test/environments
    client_rb:
        environment: kitchen
# etc...

Notes:

• You must use .json files for the environment files with chef-zero. It doesn’t understand .rb environment files.
• chef-zero uses client_rb whereas chef-solo uses solo_rb. Why? Because chef-solo isn’t a full chef server.

Example environment .json file:

{
    "name": "myenvironment",
    "description": "My Chef environment",
    "cookbook_versions": {},
    "json_class": "Chef::Environment",
    "chef_type": "environment",
    "default_attributes": {},
    "override_attributes": {}
}