Test Chef cookbooks locally on a virtual workstation

When you use a virtual machine to write your Chef cookbooks you may want to test them locally with Vagrant.

This nested virtual machine cannot use a 64 bit operating system, because to run a 64 bit virtual machine, the host computer’s CPU has to provide the CPU Extensions. Currently only physical CPUs can provide the CPU Extensions, no virtualization software can do that.

The Chef Test Kitchen uses Vagrant to launch test instances. In the background Vagrant uses the VirtualBox engine, so your virtual workstation needs to have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed.

To make sure TestKitchen uses the 32 bit operating system first we will set up the 32 bit virtual machine in Vagrant.

Install the necessary software

1. Install the Chef Development Kit
2. Install VirtualBox
3. Install Vagrant

Create the 32 bit virtual machine

1. Open a terminal window
2. Initialize the vagrant virtual machine. Vagrant will download the OS image and start the virtual machine.

    vagrant init hashicorp/precise32

3. Stop the virtual machine

   vagrant halt

4. Make sure all Vagrant virtual machines are off

    vagrant global-status

   The result looks like this:

   id name provider state directory
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   21590cd default virtualbox running C:/Users/interview/Documents

5. Shut down the running virtual machines. Add the id of the virtual machine to any command to administer it from any directory.

   vagrant halt 21590cd

Set up the Vagrant connection in the Chef cookbook for Test Kitchen

1. Navigate to cookbook folder
2. Edit the .kitchen.yml file:Set the network port forwarding in the driver section:

   driver:
     name: vagrant
     network:
       - ["forwarded_port", {guest: 2200, host: 2222}]
       - ["private_network", {ip: "127.0.0.1"}]
   
   platforms:
     - name: hashicorp/precise32

3. Test the cookbook

   kitchen converge hashicorp-precise32