# Success Stories for chef-dk on Windows

**URL:** <https://discourse.chef.io/t/success-stories-for-chef-dk-on-windows/6224>\
**Category:** Chef Infra (archive)\
**Created:** [January 28, 2015, 2:09pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/success-stories-for-chef-dk-on-windows/6224 "2015-01-28T14:09:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![David\_F\_Severski](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/david_f_severski/32/170_2.png) [@David\_F\_Severski](https://discourse.chef.io/u/David_F_Severski)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2015, 2:09pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/success-stories-for-chef-dk-on-windows/6224/1 "2015-01-28T14:09:26Z")

</div>

Ohai, all!

Is chef-dk (0.3.5 and 0.3.6) working well for Windows users? I’ve not been  
tracking chef-dk as closely as I’d like, so apologies if this is a repeat  
question.

Since pulling off my stand alone ruby install and running out of the box  
chef-dk, I’ve had problems with both foodcritic (runs silently do nothing)  
and with test-kitchen (converge actions die due to pathnames being too  
long). I run with a couple different drives (C: for chef-dk, D: for most of  
my cookbook dev repos, and E: for my sandbox VMs) and suspect this may be  
the root of Much Evil™ for ruby based tools (the heartache I’ve gone  
through with Vagrant on this is staggering).

I’d appreciate any thumbs up/down from fellow Windows 7 users that have  
multiple drives and are using chef-dk. I keep my host OS pretty clean and  
it’s unlikely (though certainly possible) that I’ve radically tweaked  
something in a way that doesn’t appreciate being tweaked.

David

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**Author:** ![Shubby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Shubby](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Shubby)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2015, 2:45pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/success-stories-for-chef-dk-on-windows/6224/2 "2015-01-28T14:45:01Z")

</div>

Sorry, not a Windows user here so I can't thumb up or down, but as a  
Windows sysadmin (formerly anyway), when I hear something like "path names  
too long" I have to ask: are said path names actually too long? NTFS is not  
friends with path names longer than 255 characters, which I know is a  
grotesque notion in this day and age, but a source of problems nonetheless,  
and if you have such paths, it's not an issue directly related to Chef-DK,  
although you could blame it for creating those paths in the first place! 🙂

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 9:09 AM, David F. Severski [davidski@deadheaven.com](mailto:davidski@deadheaven.com)  
wrote:

> Ohai, all!
> 
> Is chef-dk (0.3.5 and 0.3.6) working well for Windows users? I've not been  
> tracking chef-dk as closely as I'd like, so apologies if this is a repeat  
> question.
> 
> Since pulling off my stand alone ruby install and running out of the box  
> chef-dk, I've had problems with both foodcritic (runs silently do nothing)  
> and with test-kitchen (converge actions die due to pathnames being too  
> long). I run with a couple different drives (C: for chef-dk, D: for most of  
> my cookbook dev repos, and E: for my sandbox VMs) and suspect this may be  
> the root of Much Evil(tm) for ruby based tools (the heartache I've gone  
> through with Vagrant on this is staggering).
> 
> I'd appreciate any thumbs up/down from fellow Windows 7 users that have  
> multiple drives and are using chef-dk. I keep my host OS pretty clean and  
> it's unlikely (though certainly possible) that I've radically tweaked  
> something in a way that doesn't appreciate being tweaked.
> 
> David

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tknerr](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/tknerr/32/21_2.png) [@tknerr](https://discourse.chef.io/u/tknerr)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2015, 2:46pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/success-stories-for-chef-dk-on-windows/6224/3 "2015-01-28T14:46:26Z")

</div>

Hi David,

ChefDK works fairly well on Windows I would say. There are some glitches if  
you install it to anything other than C:/opscode/chefdk afaik

If you want to keep your system clean and have taken care of the above  
mentioned issue you might be interested in this:

> **[GitHub - tknerr/bills-kitchen: All you need for cooking with Chef and Vagrant...](https://github.com/tknerr/bills-kitchen)**
>
> All you need for cooking with Chef and Vagrant on Windows you will find in Bill's Kitchen - GitHub - tknerr/bills-kitchen: All you need for cooking with Chef and Vagrant on Windows you will fin...

Here's an example cookbook repo which runs all kinds of tests (including  
test-kitchen) in a bundle environment, which works perfectly fine with the  
ChefDK embedded Ruby (in fact this is part of my acceptance test suite for  
bills kitchen ;-)):

> **[GitHub - tknerr/sample-toplevel-cookbook: A sample "top-level" cookbook...](https://github.com/tknerr/sample-toplevel-cookbook)**
>
> A sample "top-level" cookbook hosting a website. Contribute to tknerr/sample-toplevel-cookbook development by creating an account on GitHub.

HTH,  
Torben  
Am 28.01.2015 15:09 schrieb "David F. Severski" [davidski@deadheaven.com](mailto:davidski@deadheaven.com):

> Ohai, all!
> 
> Is chef-dk (0.3.5 and 0.3.6) working well for Windows users? I've not been  
> tracking chef-dk as closely as I'd like, so apologies if this is a repeat  
> question.
> 
> Since pulling off my stand alone ruby install and running out of the box  
> chef-dk, I've had problems with both foodcritic (runs silently do nothing)  
> and with test-kitchen (converge actions die due to pathnames being too  
> long). I run with a couple different drives (C: for chef-dk, D: for most of  
> my cookbook dev repos, and E: for my sandbox VMs) and suspect this may be  
> the root of Much Evil(tm) for ruby based tools (the heartache I've gone  
> through with Vagrant on this is staggering).
> 
> I'd appreciate any thumbs up/down from fellow Windows 7 users that have  
> multiple drives and are using chef-dk. I keep my host OS pretty clean and  
> it's unlikely (though certainly possible) that I've radically tweaked  
> something in a way that doesn't appreciate being tweaked.
> 
> David

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Shubby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Shubby](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Shubby)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2015, 2:48pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/success-stories-for-chef-dk-on-windows/6224/4 "2015-01-28T14:48:29Z")

</div>

Correction to my earlier response: technically it's not NTFS that's the  
problem, rather it's a legacy Win32 API that is still omnipresent.

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Torben Knerr [mail@tknerr.de](mailto:mail@tknerr.de) wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> ChefDK works fairly well on Windows I would say. There are some glitches  
> if you install it to anything other than C:/opscode/chefdk afaik
> 
> If you want to keep your system clean and have taken care of the above  
> mentioned issue you might be interested in this:  
> [GitHub - tknerr/bills-kitchen: All you need for cooking with Chef and Vagrant on Windows you will find in Bill's Kitchen](https://github.com/tknerr/bills-kitchen)
> 
> Here's an example cookbook repo which runs all kinds of tests (including  
> test-kitchen) in a bundle environment, which works perfectly fine with the  
> ChefDK embedded Ruby (in fact this is part of my acceptance test suite for  
> bills kitchen ;-)):  
> [GitHub - tknerr/sample-toplevel-cookbook: A sample "top-level" cookbook hosting a website](https://github.com/tknerr/sample-toplevel-cookbook)
> 
> HTH,  
> Torben  
> Am 28.01.2015 15:09 schrieb "David F. Severski" [davidski@deadheaven.com](mailto:davidski@deadheaven.com):
> 
> Ohai, all!
> 
> > Is chef-dk (0.3.5 and 0.3.6) working well for Windows users? I've not  
> > been tracking chef-dk as closely as I'd like, so apologies if this is a  
> > repeat question.
> > 
> > Since pulling off my stand alone ruby install and running out of the box  
> > chef-dk, I've had problems with both foodcritic (runs silently do nothing)  
> > and with test-kitchen (converge actions die due to pathnames being too  
> > long). I run with a couple different drives (C: for chef-dk, D: for most of  
> > my cookbook dev repos, and E: for my sandbox VMs) and suspect this may be  
> > the root of Much Evil(tm) for ruby based tools (the heartache I've gone  
> > through with Vagrant on this is staggering).
> > 
> > I'd appreciate any thumbs up/down from fellow Windows 7 users that have  
> > multiple drives and are using chef-dk. I keep my host OS pretty clean and  
> > it's unlikely (though certainly possible) that I've radically tweaked  
> > something in a way that doesn't appreciate being tweaked.
> > 
> > David