Feature Development Workflow

Introduction

Let's step through the feature development workflow covered earlier in this documentation. This time, we'll cover each step in enough detail for you to fully accomplish the task with this set of tools.

Please note: This document as a whole is not a substitute for learning Chef Development. What's covered in this doc is an overview of our current process.

Workflow

1. Write feature tests

Read this first: Server Specs

Then:

  1. Decide on the test type to write
    • Consider the test examples you just read about
    • Tie the tests to the feature and the acceptance criteria / specifications
    • Steps below will assume Server Spec
    • Other types may be added
  2. Decide whether the test/tests should be part of an existing test suite or a new one
    • If you decide to add a new test suite, you may run the task below to add a new server spec file:
      • rake add:spec name="Test Name" desc="Test Description"
  3. Write your tests

2. Clean up old work

Run kitchen destroy to clean up old work

3. Create a test box and provision it with our cookbook

Run kitchen converge

4. Run all tests on the box

Run kitchen verify

Review test results to determine what tests are not passing and what needs changed to make them pass.

5. Use community cookbook recipes or write/edit our own in order to add functionality which meet our requirements

- To add a new recipe to the 7-Iron Cookbook run the following:

rake add:recipe name="Recipe Name"

- To add a new community cookbook recipe:

  1. Add the cookbook as a dependency in metadata.rb
  2. Cookbook version numbers are desired but not required.
  3. Download new and updated cookbooks
  4. Run berks update

- Lint

You can use the foodcritic lint tool on the cookbook by running:

rake style:chef

Add Recipes to Run List

See 7-Iron::default

6. Re-provision

Run kitchen converge

Any changes to a recipe or new recipes will be converged into the box. This is done through kitchen converge.

Kitchen Converge incrementally adds changes to a provisioned Vagrant box. This tool significantly speeds up our development process. We do not have to wait for a full provision for every change we want to test.

Note: Use kitchen converge during recipe development but make sure to test the final recipe on a fully clean instance.
There are times when developing with kitchen converge that you will get a passing test on a second or follow-up converge that did not pass after an initial run. Usually this is due to the order of recipes during provision.

Make sure you do your final testing on a clean (not previously converged) box. Use: kitchen test instead of kitchen converge and kitchen verify

7. Repeat 4, 5, and 6 (committing iterative changes as needed) until complete

8. Test with Kitchen Test

Run: kitchen test

Kitchen test will destroy any previous states, start at a new state, and verify the box from scratch.