Best Practices: Testing Chefspecs that use Berkshelf in Jenkins

Question

I want to integrate my ChefSpecs with Jenkins in a way that there is one Jenkins job that runs all specs of all cookbooks and prints one summary. Unfortunately that doesn't seem as easy as I have thought. Writing a simple Rakefile that creates a rspec rake task (like when testing standard Ruby specs) won't help because rspec expects a Berksfile in the directory from which it is called.

So there seem to be only two ways to test cookbook specs ...

• Creating a Jenkins job for each and every cookbook
• Iterating manually through the cookbooks in Jenkins and calling rspec in each cookbook I find. Which will not print a summary of all tests and seems stupid anyway for multiple other reasons.

What is the recommended way here? Do I need to create a seperate job for every cookbook or is there a better way? Especially in combination with Berkshelf?

I can see the advantages of having a job for every cookbook's spec but that also means doing a git pull for dozens of cookbooks from the same repo. We currently use the "all cookbooks in one repo"-approach

Cheers, Stefan

Answer 1

If you can re-organize git repositories of your cookbooks, try following:

1. Having following directory structure

   Vagrantfile Gemfile Berksfile cookbooks/cookbook_a/metadata.rb cookbooks/cookbook_a/recipes/recipe_1.rb cookbooks/cookbook_a/recipes/recipe_2.rb cookbooks/cookbook_b/metadata.rb cookbooks/cookbook_b/recipes/recipe_5.rb cookbooks/cookbook_b/recipes/recipe_6.rb spec/spec_helper.rb spec/cookbook_a/recipe_1_spec.rb spec/cookbook_a/recipe_2_spec.rb spec/cookbook_b/recipe_5_spec.rb spec/cookbook_a/recipe_6_spec.rb

2. execute following 1 command:

   bundle exec rspec spec

This will execute chefspec for all the cookbook found under spec/ directory. And my Jenkins job is contains above command.