Kitchen Cupbord

Purpose

Kitchen Cupboard serves as a local, write-through cache of resources to be used along with test-kitchen. By using a cache and avoiding accessing the network for each download, performance can be improved in testing enviromnets. While you will likely see some performance gains in all scenarios, this solution is specifically intended for enviroments where the user is connected to application repositories through a VPN and network is a significant bottleneck.

Requirements

• Latest version of test-kitchen
• Most recent version of Chefdk

Architecture

Kitchen Cupboard provides a virtual machine running that exposes ports 80 and 443 as HTTP and HTTPS proxies respectively. Each request made through the proxies will be cached locally, either in memory or on disk, according to Squid's internal caching policies. By default, there is 1 gigabyte of memory cache and 7000mb of disk cache with a 512mb max object size. These be modified by overwriting default['open_localdev_proxy']['squid']['cache_mem'], default['open_localdev_proxy']['squid']['cache_size'], and default['open_localdev_proxy']['squid']['max_obj_size']. By default, cached objects are persistant accross destory/rebuild cycles of the virtual machine. This is accomplished by mounting a VirtualBox Shared Folder and writing cache objects to that location. Realizing that this may inhibit performance in some cases, this can be modified with the default['open_localdev_proxy']['squid']['cache_dir'] directive. Once a cache is built you will need to manually purge the cache directory (.cache) in this directory.

Platform

The proxy is running on a Centos instance inside a vagrant virtual machine.

Use

• Run $ kitchen converge inside this directory. This will start a virtual machine with the proxy running.
• Configure the .kitchen.yml of your project to be on the same shared network as this proxy, by adding the directive:

  network:
    - ["private_network", {ip: "172.16.1.XXX"}]

Where XXX is from 4-255

• Add the lines:

  ENV['HTTP_PROXY'] = "172.16.1.3:80"
  ENV['HTTPS_PROXY'] = "172.16.1.3:443"

to the top of your default recipe to ensure that the proxies are used accross the chef-client run

• Enjoy faster downloads of artifacts during chef-client runs.