Debugging Cookbooks - chef-boneyard/chef-summit-2014 GitHub Wiki

Friday, Metropolitan, 1000

• Salim Afiune

~30-40 community members

• converge, read failure notes
• extract logic into poro (plain old ruby objects) and rspec those
• 'require "pry"; binding.pry'
• byebug/pry
• using chef-shell (shef)
• using "breakpoint" statements pause execution in chef-shell, but not during a normal chef-client run
• kitchen + guard...then "bundle exec guard start" to monitor local changes (will kick off kitchen converges)
• writing serverspec against existing systems to "survey" reality...then develop against those (so moving systems into chef control is less scary)
• mindset: believe you have a problem / using "git bisect" to organize debugging
• chefspec (tdd)
• reading chef code (yay for open source!)
• editing/updating chef code
• an IDE (eclipse/netbeans) debug -- to explore chef (watching compile/converge phase step by step)
• read the docs (if there is one!) or write it (!) (chef docs are open source...PR welcome!)

• strategically placed "puts" and/or Chef::Log
• using "log" resource gives output during converge (not compile, which "puts" will give you)
• Chef::Log happens at compile
• log resource happens at converge

• foodcritic
• rubocop (recipe linting tools)
• syntastic (for vim) (aside: spf13 is an opinionated vim environment setup project)
• finstyle

• online guides to setup chefspec run (+1) -- look at hw-cookbooks (haproxy, etc) as examples -- chefspec has examples directory (how to test scenarios) -- good starting place

• can we use pry-remote? - I think so ... my first stab ;) https://github.com/jmccann/kitchen-binding