Strainer

Strainer is a gem for isolating and testing individual chef cookbooks. It allows you to keep all your cookbooks in a single repository (saving you time and money), while having all the benefits of individual repositories.

Usage

Strainer is a command line tool. The first thing you should do is add the following entry into your .gitignore and chefignore files:

colander

The colander is where strainer puts all your temporary files for testing.

Next, create a Colanderfile. Cookbook-level Colanderfiles will take precedence over root-level ones. For simplicity, let’s just create one in the root of our chef repository:

# Colanderfile
knife test: bundle exec knife cookbook test $COOKBOOK
foodcritic: bundle exec foodcritic -f any $COOKBOOK

Colanderfile exposes two variables:

• $COOKBOOK - the current running cookbook
• $SANDBOX - the sandbox path

Just like foreman, the labels don’t actually matter - they are only used in formatting the output.

That Colanderfile will run foodcritic and knife test. I recommend this as the bare minimum for a cookbook test.

To strain, simply run the strain command and pass in the cookbooks to strain:

# strain phantomjs and tmux
bundle exec strain phantomjs tmux

This will run knife test and foodcritic against both of the cookbooks. You can pass in as many cookbooks are you’d like.

Needs Your Help

This is a list of features or problem you can help solve! Fork and submit a pull request to make Strain even better!

• Threading - Run each cookbook’s tests (or each cookbook tests test) in a separate thread