Kitchen docker

Test Kitchen is a tool for you to test code and software in an isolated target platforms. They could be a VM (default), docker, lxc-container, or even a VPS in the clouds, such as Azure, Blue Box, Amazon EC2, Rackspace, DigitalOcean, OpenStack, etc. Many test frameworks are support, such as Rspec, Bats, shUnit2, and Serverspec in the kitchen.

Here I want to introduce you how to setup a docker driver for kitchen instead of default one using Vagrant. It may cut to a dramatical short of the time of your testing cycles.

Step 1. Prepare a system or VM with docker and kitchen installed.

$ kitchen login
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-32-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/
Last login: Fri Sep 19 06:40:45 2014 from 10.0.2.2
vagrant@cheftraining:~$ ls
vagrant@cheftraining:~$ docker -v
Docker version 1.2.0, build fa7b24f
vagrant@cheftraining:~$ kitchen -v
Test Kitchen version 1.2.1
vagrant@cheftraining:~$

Step 2. Create a kitchen with docker driver

$ kitchen init --driver=kitchen-docker --create-gemfile

Step 3. Edit .kitchen.yml as follow

---
driver:
  name: docker

provisioner:
  name: chef_solo

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-14.04

suites:
  - name: default
    run_list:
    attributes:

Step 4. Bundle install to fetch any new gem, and then, create an instance.

$ bundle install
$ kitchen create

Step 5. Check current instances, which ready for your provisioning.

$ kitchen list
Instance             Driver  Provisioner  Last Action
default-ubuntu-1404  Docker  ChefSolo     Created

Now, you can add cookbook recipes for testing with kitchen. You can find it is much much faster to create an instance after docker images are created. It only took me 0.76s to create new an instance, compared with vagrant to create a VM in minutes.

If you want to know what else drivers you can use for kitchen beside docker and vagrant? Just type:

$ kitchen driver discover

Kitchen docker for fast chef tests