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  <h3>A library of tools to enable test driven development</h3>   
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  <p class="book-description">Test-Driven Infrastructure with
  Chef<br/>by Stephen Nelson-Smith<br/>Published by O’Reilly</p>
  
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<h2>Overview</h2>

<p><strong>Cucumber-chef</strong>is a library of tools to enable the
emerging discipline of infrastructure as code to practice test driven
development.  It provides a testing platform within which cucumber
tests can be run which provision lightweight virtual machines,
configure them by applying the appriporaite Chef roles to them, and
then run acceptance and integration tests against the environment.</p>



<p>It begins with a very simple premise. with a very simple
premise.  If we are framing our infratructure as code - if we're
writing cookbooks, recipes and other pieces of automation in a high
level programming language, such as Ruby, then it makes sense to
follow the current wisdom across the software development world to
maximise the quality, maintainability and reusability of our code,
providing maximum chance that we'll deliver value with it.  One
area which has been shown to have a very positive effect is the
practive of 'test-driven' development.  In this paradigm, the
developer begins by writing a test that captures the intended
behaviour of the code  they are going to write.  This test will
start out by failing.  The developer then writes code to make the
test pass, and iterates thereafter.</p>

<strong>Cucumber-Chef</strong> provides a framework to make it easier
to do test-driven development for infrastructure. It does this by
providing a test infrastructure, in the cloud, which provides a very
fast, lightweight and cheap way to fire up virtual machines for
testing.  We call this the "test lab".</p>


<p>As you might have guessed from the name, we're going to write high
level acceptance tests using Cucumber.  Cucumber-Chef provides step
definitions and helper methods to make it easy to provision and manage
machines with Chef, and then build end-to-end tests.</p>


<ul> <li><strong>Test Lab:</strong> An environment made up (at
  present) of an EC2 instance, configured to be an LXC host. This
  machine does nothing other than provide space in which Linux
  containers can be created and destroyed.</li>
  
  <li><strong>Controller:</strong> One special Linux container which
  acts as the central point from which tests are run. This machine is
  where the tests run, and has connectivity and credentials to connect
  to the machines that are created as part of a test run.</li>
  
  <li><strong>Container:</strong> A container is a lightweight virtual
  machine - it is entirely self-contained, with its own process tree,
  resource constraints, filesystem and network stack. It shares a
  kernel with the Test Lab host server.</li> </ul>
  
  
  <h3>Getting Started</h3>

  <p>Getting started with <strong>Cucumber-Chef</strong> is a simple,
  three step process:</p>
  


  <ul>
    <li>1) Install Cucumber-Chef</li>
    <li>2) Integrate with Hosted Chef and Amazon EC2</li>
    <li>3) Run cucumber-chef setup</li>
  </ul>

  <h3>Installing Cucumber-Chef</h3>

  <p>Installing Cucumber-Chef is simple.  It's distributed as a
  RubyGem, so you can simply run:</p>
  

<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ gem install cucumber-chef
    </code></pre> 
</div>

<p>Once installed, you can run cucumber-chef on the command line to
get an overview of the tasks it can carry out.</p>


<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ cucumber-chef 
Tasks:
  cucumber-chef connect                 # Connect to a container in your test lab
  cucumber-chef destroy                 # Destroy running test labs
  cucumber-chef displayconfig           # Display the current config from knife.rb
  cucumber-chef help [TASK]             # Describe available tasks or one specific task
  cucumber-chef info                    # Display information about the current test lab
  cucumber-chef project &lt;project name&gt;  # Create a project template for testing an infrastructure
  cucumber-chef setup                   # Set up a cucumber-chef test lab in Amazon EC2
  cucumber-chef test                    # Run a cucumber-chef test suite from a workstation.
  cucumber-chef upload &lt;project name&gt;   # Upload a cucumber-chef test
</code></pre> 
</div>

<h3>Integrate with Hosted Chef and Amazon EC2</h3> 

<p>In it's current incarnation, Cucumber-Chef makes two important
assumptions.  Firstly, it assumes you're using Opscode Hosted Chef
rather than your own Chef server.  Secondly, it assume that you are
comfortable with using Amazon's EC2 service for providing the 'bare
metal' on which we set up the test lab.  </p>



<p><strong>Cucumber-chef</strong> is tightly integrated with Chef - it
uses your knife.rb for credentials, and any cucumber-chef-specific
configuration goes in knife.rb under the cucumber-chef namespace.</p>


<p>On installation, the first thing you should do is run:</p>

<div class="inset-box">
  <pre>
    $ cucumber-chef displayconfig
   </pre>
</div>

<p>This will look for your knife.rb, and extract the relevant
sections, check them, and display them on the screen. If any entries
are missing, it will alert you.</p>


<p>The recommended best practice for Chef is to keep your knife.rb
inside your organisation's Chef repository, inside the .chef
directory, and use environment variables to specify username,
organisation name and cloud provider credentials.  Cucumber-chef
supports and encourages this approach.  It will search for a
directory called .chef in your current directory, and then carry on
going up the directory tree until it finds one.  In practice this
means that if you stay within the chef-repo directory for the
organisation on which you're working, cucumber-chef will use the
knife.rb; if your elsewhere in the filesystem rooted in your home
directory, and have .chef in your home directory, cucumber-chef
will use that.  Otherwise you'll need to either change into a
directory where a .chef can be found, or copy, creatre or link
accordingly.  In most cases we anticipate that you'll be inside the
chef-repo of your organisation, and the documentation is written
from this perspective.</p>

<p>If you haven't already, refactor your knife.rb to look like this:</p> 

<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>current_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
user = ENV['OPSCODE_USER'] || ENV['USER']
log_level :info
log_location STDOUT
node_name user
client_key "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/#{user}.pem"
validation_client_name "#{ENV['ORGNAME']}-validator"
validation_key "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/#{ENV['ORGNAME']}-validator.pem"
chef_server_url "https://api.opscode.com/organizations/#{ENV['ORGNAME']}"
cache_type 'BasicFile'
cache_options( :path =&gt; "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/checksums" )
cookbook_path ["#{current_dir}/../cookbooks"]
</code></pre>
</div>

<p>Now set your Hosted Chef username and organization name using
environment variables:</p>


<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ export OPSCODE_USER=platform_user_name
$ export ORGNAME=platform_organisation
</code></pre>
</div>

<p>Now put your validator and client keys in $HOME/.chef.  Verify that
everything still works:</p>


<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ knife client list
</code></pre> 
</div>

<p>If you get results back, we're in business.</p> 

<p>Now add the EC2 configuration:</p> 

<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>knife[:aws_access_key_id] = ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID']
knife[:aws_secret_access_key] = ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY']
knife[:aws_ssh_key_id] = ENV['AWS_SSH_KEY_ID']
knife[:identity_file] = "/path/to/aws_ssh_key.pem"
knife[:availability_zone] = "eu-west-1a"
knife[:region] = "eu-west-1"
knife[:aws_image_id] = "ami-339ca947"
</code></pre>
</div>

<p>Note that right now Cucumber-Chef only supports Ubuntu-based  test
labs.</p>


<p>And set your environment variables:</p> 

<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=SEKRITKEY
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=REELYSEKRITKEY
$ export AWS_SSH_KEY_ID
</code></pre>
</div>

<p>And then ensure your AWS ssh key is in place.</p> 

<p>Now check your config again, with cucumber-chef display config.  If
you get no complaints, you're ready to set up a test lab.</p>


<h3>Run cucumber-chef setup</h3> 

<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ cucumber-chef setup
</code></pre> 
</div>

<p>This command will set up a complete test lab environment, As long
as you've provided valid AWS and Opscode credentials, it will do this
automatically.  The process takes about 15 minutes, after which you'll
have a fully funtioning platform available for you to use.  Let's just
quickly review what that means.  You will have an EC2 machine, fully
managed by Chef, and providing the following:</p>


<ul> 
  <li>The ability to provision LXC containers</li> 
  <li>The ability to run tests against LXC containers</li> 
  <li>A dedicated container for certain kinds of testing scenarios</li> 
</ul>

<p>The next stage is to set up a project.  A project is simply a
directory structure for containing your cucumber features and steps,
already set up with an appropriate environment to make use of the
step definitions provided with cucumber-chef.  We think it makes
most sense to have this in your organisation's chef repo.
Cucumber-chef provides a task which will create a the directory for
you, and populate it with a README and an example feature and
step.</p>


<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ cd /path/to/chef-repo
$ cucumber-chef project example
</code></pre> 
</div>

<p>This will create a directory, cucumber-chef, and a subdirectory, example.</p> 

<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>└── example
    ├── README
    └── features
        ├── example.feature
        ├── step_definitions
        │   └── example_step.rb
        └── support
            └── env.rb
</code></pre>
</div>

<h2>Writing tests</h2> 

<p>Once you've got your test lab set up, and you've generated a
project, it's time to crack on with writing a test.  The basic idea is
this:</p>



<p>
<ul>
  <li>1) An infrastructure requirement is established</li>
  <li>2) Write a cucumber feature that expresses the required
  behaviour of the infrastructure requirement</li>
  
  <li>3) Write steps that will build this infrastructure environment
  on the test lab, using the step definitions provided - these include
  the ability to create a container, apply roles to it, and destroy it
  again.</li>
  
  <li>4) Write cookbooks and recipes and supporting code to make
  the test pass</li>
</ul></p> 

<h2>Running tests</h2> 

<p>You can write the tests and Chef code wherever you like.  We're
assuming you prefer working on your local machine, and checking into
version control.  But we don't really care.  When it's time to run
tests, cucumber-chef provides a task which handles this:</p>


<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ cucumber-chef test myproject
</code></pre>
</div>

<p>At the moment cucumber-chef doesn't pass though clever filtering
and tagging options that cucumber supports - you run all the tests.
We're going to improve that soon, again, patches and pull requests
very welcome.</p>


<p>Running the test task will upload your current project to the test
lab, and run the tests, reporting the results back to the screen.
Cucumber-chef also provides an upload task, so you can push the
current project to the test lab, and then connect to test lab yourself
to run tests in a more granular way.  To do this, you need to know the
IP of the test lab.  You can find this out by running:</p>


<div class="inset-box">
  <pre><code>$ cucumber-chef info 
</code></pre>
</div>

<p>At present, Cucumber-Chef only allows one test lab per AWS account
and Opscode Hosted Chef account.</p>


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