Testing and chef best practices

Hi,

I am writing a recipe that cretes a windows service. Is it better to have a
hard-coded service name or parameterize this in some way? I the latter, what
method is better, databags or is ther something else?

Also should I write a unit test using ChefSpec for this or is just an
integration test sufficient?

What are people’s testing preferences around uses of third-party cookbooks?

Kind regards

Sean.

  1. Parameterise it if it's something that would need changing. If it's a
    service for something specific and that service usually has a well known
    name then don't parameterise it
  2. If you use parameters then set them as attributes in an attribute file
    in your cookbook, i.e.
    default['mycookbook']['service_name'] = 'myservice'
    default['mycookbook']['service_port'] = 1234
  3. If this is a cookbook that you intend to release to the community then I
    would write both unit and integration tests. It's a lot quicker to run a
    chefspec suite (especially if you use caching instead of let) than full
    integration tests, so you can run those while you're developing to quickly
    see if you've introduced a problem and then move up to integration tests
    once those pass

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 8:22 PM, Sean Farrow seanfarrow1984@gmail.com
wrote:

Hi,

I am writing a recipe that cretes a windows service. Is it better to have
a hard-coded service name or parameterize this in some way? I the latter,
what method is better, databags or is ther something else?

Also should I write a unit test using ChefSpec for this or is just an
integration test sufficient?

What are people’s testing preferences around uses of third-party cookbooks?

Kind regards

Sean.

--
Yoshi Spendiff
Ops Engineer
Indochino
Mobile: +1 778 952 2025
Email: yoshi.spendiff@indochino.com

If you are intending this as a library cookbook for public reuse its
better to follow the pattern in the new mysql and httpd cookbooks.

Don't use attributes or recipes at all and instead export resources and
providers. Those kinds of cookbooks shouldn't have anything in the
attributes directory or anything in the recipes directory.

And if you're not familiar with ChefSpec, Rspec, Chef architecture and
unit testing then ChefSpec can be a bit much conceptually at first.
People who pick that up often start trying to write tests to test Chef's
behavior instead of just testing that the resource collection is getting
constructed correctly (and if you write LWRPs then you immediately start
trying to test LWRPs with ChefSpec which gets even more interesting).
Doing integration tests with serverspec is a lot more natural since
you're spinning up a virt and really converging chef against it and then
testing fairly logical assertions like "must be listening on port 80".
The problem with integration tests is that they're much slower and
ChefSpec gives you the ability to test cross platform code without
spinning up any virts at all. I'd start learning about testing chef
recipes with TK+serverspec (or BATS) first.

On 06/16/2015 08:06 AM, Yoshi Spendiff wrote:

  1. Parameterise it if it's something that would need changing. If it's
    a service for something specific and that service usually has a well
    known name then don't parameterise it
  2. If you use parameters then set them as attributes in an attribute
    file in your cookbook, i.e.
    default['mycookbook']['service_name'] = 'myservice'
    default['mycookbook']['service_port'] = 1234
  3. If this is a cookbook that you intend to release to the community
    then I would write both unit and integration tests. It's a lot quicker
    to run a chefspec suite (especially if you use caching instead of let)
    than full integration tests, so you can run those while you're
    developing to quickly see if you've introduced a problem and then move
    up to integration tests once those pass

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 8:22 PM, Sean Farrow <seanfarrow1984@gmail.com
mailto:seanfarrow1984@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I am writing a recipe that cretes a windows service. Is it better
to have a hard-coded service name or parameterize this in some
way? I the latter, what method is better, databags or is ther
something else?

Also should I write a unit test using ChefSpec for this or is just
an integration test sufficient?

What are people’s testing preferences around uses of third-party
cookbooks?

Kind regards

Sean.

--
Yoshi Spendiff
Ops Engineer
Indochino
Mobile: +1 778 952 2025
Email: yoshi.spendiff@indochino.com mailto:yoshi.spendiff@indochino.com