Skip steps in an InSpec integration test based on Chef attribute values

To speed up the test of some complex recipes, I use an attribute to skip certain long-running installations when I only need to test the rest of the recipe.

We will pass Chef Attribute values into an InSpec test using environment variables.

Declare an attribute in the atrributes.rb file with a safe default value, to allow the execution of all steps if the value is not overridden

# Set this to true in the .kitchen.yml file to skip long-running tasks during local test
default['quick_launch_for_test'] = false

Set the value in the suites: section of the kitchen.yml file to true to skip the long-running installations

  attributes:
    quick_launch_for_test: true

Save the attribute value in an environment variable in the recipe to pass it to InSpec

# Store the value in an environment variable for the integration test
env 'quick_launch_for_test' do
  value "#{node['quick_launch_for_test']}"
end

Make a decision in the recipe based on the value of the attribute

if ( node['quick_launch_for_test'] != true )
  #########################################
  #Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017 #
  #########################################
  ...
end

Read the value of the environment variable into a local variable in the InSpec test file. If the environment variable does not exist, or the value is not “true”, the value of the local_execution variable will be “false”.

local_execution = ( os_env('quick_launch_for_test').content() == 'true')

Use the if statement to make the decision in your InSpec test file

if !local_execution
  describe package('Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017') do
    it { should be_installed }
  end
end