chef-koans

An experimental, test-driven way to learn about Chef. Takes some inspiration from Ruby Koans and from other things that are awesome and simple.

Getting Ready

• Have the Chef-DK installed.
• Have Vagrant installed.
• (currently) have Virtualbox installed.
• Clone this repository to a directory on your workstation using git clone.
• Run chef exec bundle install from your local working copy.

You should now have everything you need on your workstation to begin learning Chef.

You should.

But let's test it.

Getting Started

If you're reading this README from your workstation, you're on the master branch of the repo.

Run kitchen test. This will:

• Invoke Test Kitchen (http://kitchen.ci/)
• Download a Vagrant box image.
• Start a new VM on your system.
• Install the latest version of Chef on the new VM.
• Run Chef against the /empty/ cookbook in this repository.
• Run tests against the VM.

This is the test cycle you're going to use as you walk the path to enlightenment. The first time, it will take a few minutes.

Did it work?

Yes, the VM started and all tests passed!

• Please check out branch step-1. You can use the command git checkout -b step-1 followed by git pull origin step-1 from within the chef-koans repository to do this.

No, I encountered a problem.

• It's okay, lots of software doesn't work all the time. Here are some things to try:
  • Try it again. It doesn't seem like it should work, but it can't hurt.
  • Google the error message - whatever is marked in red, or the first line of text that sounds ominous, like NameError: failed to reticulate splines or frob() returned 1, expected 0.
  • Go to GitHub and search the issues http://github.com/leftathome/chef-koans/issues to see if anyone's come across your problem before. Maybe someone has figured out your problem and posted the solution, or maybe it's the code's fault and you need to git pull to see the fix.
  • Open a [http://github.com/leftathome/chef-koans/issues/new](GitHub issue) and we'll try to fix it.

Getting Involved

If you have a lesson plan idea, find a bug or have any other idea that might make chef-koans better, please create an issue. If you want to work on chef-koans, fork the repository on GitHub and send us a pull request.