Chefspec

• Simple to get started
• Build the resource collection
• Monkeypatch a provider’s :perform_action method to do nothing.
• More complete
• A lot of monkey patching on assertions

Unit testing recipes

• You want to assert the resource collection after compiling the recipe. Borrowed from the description of rspec-puppet.
• if else logic
• Need to stub the whole chef
  • run_context
  • node object

Test according to the Chef run cycle. An overview from http://docs.opscode.com/essentials_nodes_chef_run.html. Actual code is in https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/run_context/cookbook_compiler.rb#L70-L76.

Fake that in the run context. So do that in the unit test as well to stub the run_context

• https://github.com/aespinosa/asp.net-skeleton/blob/master/cookbook/test/isolated_test.rb

Advantages

• Fast tests
• really isolated recipes
• understanding of chef’s innards

Disadvantages

• too much to stub
• Reflects on the design of chef?
• Are the tests here telling us something?