How are people testing opsworks cookbooks?

Question

I have a fairly complex deployment of dynamically configured instances of a rail apps on nginx using passenger that I currently use Capistrano for. I am trying to automate the entire process on Opsworks from creating the stack, layers, instances and dynamic app deployment. None of the existing Opsworks recipes come close to what I need so I started my own custom cookbooks. I am trying to test them using test-kitchen and vagrant but the Opsworks cookbooks have too many custom dependancies to be used locally. So it seems like I am stuck either re-inventing the wheel by using only my own recipes that don't depend on Opsworks cookbooks or trying to test my cookbooks on AWS which is slow and expensive.

Is anybody doing any custom cookbook development on Opsworks and if so how are you testing it? Are you using any community cookbooks and if so how painful have they been to get working on Opsworks?

Answer 1

Opsworks now supports Chef 11.10 and Berkshelf (http://berkshelf.com/) to manage dependencies which makes using custom cookbooks so. much. easier.

I've been pretty happy with Test Kitchen (https://github.com/test-kitchen/test-kitchen) with Vagrant & Chef Solo for local testing.

Additionally you can manually run particular recipes on an Opsworks stack from the stack settings page. Have a look here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/workingcookbook-manual.html.

You can also run cookbook tests during an Opsworks deployment with some custom JSON: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/troubleshoot-debug-test.html

Answer 2

We are using Opsworks with a lot of custom cookbooks, and vagrant as well. While the test-coverage is far from perfect, it works pretty smooth, adapting community cookbooks as well. Our cookbook repository is public: https://github.com/till/easybib-cookbooks

The interesting bits of this repo are:

• We use a role-recipe as the entry point for each layer instead of specifiying multiple recipes with the layer in opsworks: https://github.com/till/easybib-cookbooks/blob/master/easybib/recipes/role-nginxapp-api.rb
• We check if the recipe run is in AWS or in Vagrant using a custom library function: https://github.com/till/easybib-cookbooks/blob/master/easybib/libraries/easybib.rb#L208-L216
• All opsworks-specific cookbooks/providers are usually only used in the deploy-cookbook, which we only include when is_aws is true, otherwise we fall back for a default application deployment.

Browsing our cookbooks should give you some more hints for your questions. We test our cookbooks with Travis, and do not test the opsworks cookbooks at all. Although I have to note that I am currently playing around there with some ideas how to integrate them in our test runs, since without their providers, testing our deploy cookbook is pretty much impossible.