↓ Skip to main content
Kostiantyn Lysenko

Testing SaltStack code with test-kitchen — a 2019 snapshot

·279 words·2 mins
Saltstack Test-Kitchen Infrastructure-as-Code Testing
Kostiantyn Lysenko
Author
Kostiantyn Lysenko
Table of Contents

Note (2026): This post sat as a draft on my old DevOps blog from 2019. Migrating it here as-is, trimmed to what was actually finished. The original had two stub sections (“Serverspec examples next time”, “pitfalls next time”) that I never got back to — I’ve removed them rather than fake the content. Test-kitchen-salt and SaltStack are both still maintained, but the ecosystem has shifted toward Pulumi/Terraform/Ansible for most teams.

Test-kitchen in one paragraph
#

test-kitchen is the test harness Chef built originally, repurposed for any infrastructure-as-code tool. It:

  • creates throwaway VMs (or containers)
  • runs your IaC code inside them
  • runs tests against the resulting state
  • destroys the VMs

It has a plugin system, so you can swap the IaC tool (Salt, Chef, Ansible, Terraform) and the VM driver (AWS, GCP, VirtualBox, Docker) independently. Test frameworks plug in too: testinfra, busser, InSpec, Serverspec, or plain shell.

test-kitchen-salt is the plugin that makes this work for SaltStack formulas and states.

Prerequisites
#

  • Ruby
  • SaltStack
  • test-kitchen
  • test-kitchen-salt
  • A VM driver (AWS, VirtualBox, Docker, GCP, etc.)

Install
#

In the root of your salt repo (or formula repo), create a Gemfile:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

group 'integration' do
  gem 'test-kitchen'
  gem 'kitchen-vagrant'
  gem 'kitchen-ec2'
  gem 'kitchen-salt'
  gem 'kitchen-sync' # faster file copy
  gem 'git'
end

Install:

bundle install --path vendor/bundle
bundle exec kitchen --version

Daily commands
#

bundle exec kitchen list      # show suites and instances
bundle exec kitchen create    # spin up VMs
bundle exec kitchen converge  # apply your salt code
bundle exec kitchen verify    # run tests
bundle exec kitchen destroy   # tear down

Or all of the above in one shot:

bundle exec kitchen test

References
#