Testing recipes

There are a number of ways to test your recipes. One approach is to simply follow the process of developing your recipes, uploading them to your Chef server, and deploying them to a host; repeat this until you are satisfied. This has the benefit of executing your recipes on real instances, but the drawback is that it is slow, particularly if you are testing on multiple platforms, and requires that you maintain a fleet of hosts. If your cookbook run times are reasonably short and you have a small number of platforms to support them, then this might be a viable option. There is a better option to test your recipes, and it is called ChefSpec. For those who have used RSpec, a Ruby testing library, these examples will be a natural extension of RSpec. If you have never used RSpec, the beginning of this chapter will introduce you to RSpec's testing language and mechanisms.