RSpec matchers and examples for your Chef recipes

Test your Chef cookbooks nicely.

This project is heavily inspired by RSpec-puppet.

Installation

gem install rspec-chef

Example groups

Recipes

Follow this structure to organize your recipes:

library
  |
  +-- cookbooks
  |
  +-- specs
        |
        +-- recipes
              |
              +-- <recipe_name>_spec.rb

Or force the example group into the spec:

describe 'cookbook::recipe', :type => :recipe do
  ...
end

Matchers

All of the standard RSpec matchers are available for you to use when testing Chef recipes.

Checking if a recipe contains a resource

Use the matcher contain_<resource_type> matcher:

  it { should contain_remote_file }

It can take the name of the resource as a parameter:

  it { should contain_remote_file('/etc/chef/dna.json') }

It can take the parameters that the resource takes:

  it { should contain_remote_file('/etc/chef/dna.json', {:action => :nothing}) }

Use the chained method with to test the further attributes that the resource gets:

  it { should contain_remote_file('/etc/chef/dna.json').with(:source, 'dna.json.erb') }

Use the chained method without to the the resource doesn't get further unexpected attributes:

  it { should contain_remote_file('/etc/chef/dna.json').without(:owner, :group) }

Settings

Cookbooks path

The path to the cookbooks can be specified using let for each group:

describe 'foo::bar' do
  let(:cookbook_path) { File.expand_path('../cookbooks', __FILE__) }
end

Or it can be set as a global RSpec setting:

RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.cookbook_path File.expand_path('../cookbooks', __FILE__)
end

JSON attributes

Each recipe includes a node. This node can be feeded with a hash using let in the description group:

describe 'foo::bar' do
  let(:json_attributes) { {:foo => :bar} }
end

With a file in our file system:

describe 'foo::bar' do
  let(:json_attributes) { '/etc/chef/dna.json' }
end

Or with plain JSON:

describe 'foo::bar' do
  let(:json_attributes) { '{"foo": "bar"}' }
end

The JSON attributes can alson be set as a global RSpec setting:

RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.json_attributes {}
end