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.

IMPORTANT! Strainer is no longer maintained as monolithic Chef repositories are no longer recommended. This documentation and repository are kept here for historical reasons.

Usage

First, create a Strainerfile. Cookbook-level Strainerfiles will take precedence over root-level ones. For simplicity, let's just create one in the root of our chef repository:

# Strainerfile
knife test: bundle exec knife cookbook test $COOKBOOK
foodcritic: bundle exec foodcritic -f any cookbooks/$COOKBOOK

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

Strainerfiles commands are run in the context to the sandbox directory. The sandbox is essentially a clone of your working directory. This can be a bit confusing. knife cookbook test requires that you run your command against the "root" directory, yet foodcrtitic and chefspec require you run inside an actual cookbook. Here's a quick example to clear up some confusion:

# Strainerfile
knife test: bundle exec knife cookbook test $COOKBOOK
foodcritic: bundle exec foodcritic -f any $SANDBOX/$COOKBOOK
chefspec:   bundle exec rspec --color
kitchen:    bundle exec kitchen test

To strain, simply run the strainer command and pass in the cookbook(s) to strain:

$ bundle exec strainer test phantomjs tmux

This will first detect the cookbook dependencies, copy the cookbook and all dependencies into a sandbox. It will execute the contents of the Strainerfile on each cookbook.

Standalone

As of 2.0.0, Strainer supports "standalone" mode. This allows you to use Strainer file from within a cookbook. Instead of specifying the path for a cookbook, you just use test

$ bundle exec strainer test

from the root of your cookbook. Note: your cookbook must have it's own Gemfile and working directory.

Running on CI

It's very easy to use Strainer on your CI system. If your cookbook is run on Travis CI, for example, you could use the following .travis.yml file:

rvm:
  - 1.9.3
  - 2.0.0
script: bundle exec strainer test --except kitchen

(Currently test-kitchen cannot be run on Travis, which is why it's skipped)

Berkshelf

Berkshelf is a tool for managing multiple cookbooks. It works very similar to how a Gemfile works with Rubygems. If you're already using Berkshelf, Strainer will work out of the box. If you're not using Berkshelf, Strainer will work out of the box.

Failing Quickly

As of v0.0.4, there's an option for --fail-fast that will fail immediately when any strain command returns a non-zero exit code:

$ bundle exec strainer test phantomjs --fail-fast

This can save time, especially when running tests locally. This is not recommended on continuous integration.

Custom Sandboxes

By default, Strainer uses Dir.mktmpdir to execute your sandbox in. This means the directory is destroyed in due time. However, you can pass the --sandbox option to specify a specific sandbox.

Custom Foodcritic Rules

I always advocate using both Etsy Foodcritic Rules and CustomInk Foodcritic Rules in all your projects. I also advocate keeping them all as submodules in [Chef Repo]/foodcritic/.... This makes strainer unhappy...

Strainer runs everything in an isolated sandbox, inside your Chef Repo. When including additional foodcritic rules, you need to do something like this:

# Strainerfile
foodcritic: bundle exec foodcritic -I foodcritic/* -f any $SANDBOX/$COOKBOOK

Rake Task

Strainer includes a Rake task for convenience:

require 'strainer/rake_task'

Strainer::RakeTask.new(:strainer) do |s|
  s.except = [...]
  s.strainerfile = 'MyStrainerfile'
end

Thor Task

Strainer includes a Thor task for convenience:

require 'strainer/thor'

Strainer::Thor...

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