Update: see this post for the latest update on getting up and running with Test-Kitchen on windows.

About a week ago I attended the 2014 Chef Summit. I got to meet a bunch of new and interesting people and also met several who I had interacted with online but had never seen in person. One new person I met was Jay Mundrawala (@jdmundrawala). Jay works for chef and built a Test-Kitchen Busser for Pester (as a personal oss contribution and not as part of his job at Chef). You might ask…a What for What? Well this post is going to attempt to answer that and explain why I think it is important.

Pester

Pester is a unit testing framework for Powershell. It was originally created by Scott Muc (@scottmuc) a few years back. I joined in in 2012 to add support for Mocking and now development has largely been taken over by Dave Wyatt (@MSH_Dave). It is a BDD style approach to writing and running unit tests for powershell. However, as we will see here, you can write more than just unit tests. You can write a suite of tests to ensure your infrastructure is built and runs as intended.

The whole idea of writing tests for powershell is new to a lot of long time scripters. However, as just mentioned, this framework has been around for a few years but is just now starting to gain some popularity among the powershell community and in fact the Powershell team at Microsoft is now beginning to use it themselves.

Many entrenched in the Chef ecosystem have undoubtedly been exposed to rspec and rspec derivative tools for writing tests for their chef recipes and other ruby gems. Pester is very much inspired by rspec and many familiar with rspec who take a first look at Pester may not immediately notice the difference. There are indeed several differences but the primary difference is one is written in and for ruby and the other powershell.

Test-Kitchen

Test kitchen is a tool that is widely used within the Chef community but can also be used by other Configuration management tools like Puppet. Test kitchen is not a test framework per se but it is a sort of meta framework that provides a plugin architecture around configuration management scripts that makes it easy to use one or more of many testing frameworks with your infrastructure management scripts.

There are issues specific to configuration management that make such a tool as Test-kitchen very useful. In addition to simply running tests, Test-Kitchen can manage the creation and destruction of a VM or other computing resource where tests can be run in a repeatable, disposable and rebuildable manner. Again, this is managed by another plugin family of provisioners. Some may use the vagrant driver, others docker, vsphere, EC2, etc. Using Test-kitchen, I can watch as an instance is provisioned, built, tested ad then destroyed without any side effects impacting my local environment.

The plugin that manages different test frameworks is called the busser. This plugin is responsible for “bussing” code from your local machine to a virtual test instance. Jay’s busser, like all the others simply make sure that Pester gets installed on the system where you want your tests to run. Since Pester is a powershell based tool. You are typically going to be running Pester tests on a windows machine and the cool thing here is that you can write them in “pure” powershell. No need to wrap all of your powershell inside of ruby language constructs. Its all 100% powershell here.

Enter DSC – Microsoft’s Desired State Configuration

This is an interesting one because it is both a product (or API) of a specific technology vendor and a long time philosophical approach to infrastructure management. Some also incorrectly interpret it as a competitor trying to unseat tools like chef or Puppet. There is indeed some overlap between DSC and other configuration management tools but the easiest way to groc how DSC fits into the CM landscape is as an API for writing resources specifically for windows infrastructure. Chef, Puppet and other tools provide a broad range of features to help you oversee and codify your infrastructure. The DSC surface area is really much simpler. DSC as it stands today consists of a constantly growing set of resources that can be leveraged in your configuration management tool of choice.

What do I mean by “resource?” Resource is a ubiquitous term in the popular CM tools used to provide an abstraction or DSL over a concrete piece of infrastructure (user, group, machine, file, firewall rule, etc) The resource descries how you want this infrastructure to look and does so in code that can be reviewed, tested, linted and source controlled.

You can use straight up DSC to execute these resources which offers a bare bones approach, or you can wrap them inside of a Chef recipe that can live alongside of non-DSC resources. Now the DSC resource for your windows roles and features, sql server HA, registry keys sits inside of your larger Chef infrastructure of nodes, environments, attributes, etc.

Chef making it easy to execute DSC resources

An initial reaction to this by many would be users of DSC is, why would I use Chef? Don’t I have to learn Ruby to work with that? Well because Chef is a full featured, mature configuration management solution, you get access to all of the great reporting, and server management features of chef. If you have a mixed windows/linux shop, you can manage everything with chef. Finally, it can be a bit unwieldy using raw DSC on its own. Before you can execute DSC resources, they must be downloaded and installed. Chef makes that super easy. And as we will see with test-kitchen, now you can plug your powershell based tests right into your chef workflow.

A real world example of executing DSC resources with chef and testing with Pester

We are going to follow a typical chef workflow of writing a cookbook to build a server. In our case it will be an IIS powered web server that hosts a Nuget package feed. Nuget is a windows package management specification very similar to ruby Gems. Its also the same specification behind windows Chocolatey packages similar to apt-get/yum/rpm for linux. Our web server will provide a rest based feed similar to rubygems.org that one can use to discover nuget packages.

Welcome to the bleeding edge

Before we get started let me point out that testing cookbooks on windows has not historically been well supported but there is more interest than ever in it today. There is very active development that is driving to make this possible but it is still not available from the latest stable version of Test-Kitchen. During this year’s Chef Summit, this exact topic was discussed. The creator and maintainer of Test-Kitchen, Fletcher Nichols was present as well as several others either interested in windows support or actively working to provide first class support for windows like Salim Afiune. I was there as well and I think everyone left with a clear understanding that this work needs to come together in a future version of Test-Kitchen in the near future. I blogged on the current state of this tooling just a couple months ago. This may be seen as a continuation of that post with a specific bend towards powershell and DSC.

I will walk you through how to get your environment configured so that you can do this testing today and I will certainly update this post once the tooling is officially released.

Environment setup

I am going to assume that you do not have any of the necessary tools needed to run through the sample cookbook I am about to show. So you can pick and choose what you need to add to your system. I am also assuming you are using the ruby embedded with chefDK. If you have another ruby versioning environment, chances are you know what to do. Note: this environment does not need to be a windows box.

ChefDK

First and foremost you need chef. The easiest way to get chef along with many of the popular tools in its ecosystem like test-kitchen is to install the Chef development kit. There are downloads available for windows, mac and several linux distributions.

Vagrant

This tutorial will use Vagrant to instantiate a machine to run the cookbook and execute the tests. You can download vagrant from VagrantUp and like chef, it has downloads for all of the popular platforms.

A hypervisor

You will need something that your vagrant flavored VM can run in. Many prefer the free and feature complete VirtualBox. If you run on windows and are currently using versions 8/2012 and above, you may use Hyper-V already on your box. Note you cannot run both on the same boot instance.

Git

You will be using git to download some of the tools I am about to mention.

The WinRM Test-Kitchen fork

This will eventually and hopefully soon be merged into the authoritative test-kitchen repo. This fork has been largely developed by Salim Afiune and can be found here. There is still active development here. Currently I have my own fork of this fork working to improve performance of winrm based file transfers. My fork hopes to dramatically improve upload times of cookbooks to the test instance. The cookbook in this tutorial should just take a couple minutes to upload using my fork compared to nearly an hour and we hope to get the perf much more faster than that. Note that WinRM has no equivalent SCP functionality so implementing this is a bit crude. Here is how you can use and install my fork: