23 Sep 2014

Simple Chef Package Cache for Kitchen

There is many times you have limited or slow internet access, but still need to converge a machine. And each converge it downloads and installs the Chef-Client which can take quite a while. Here’s a hacky way to share you’re /tmp/kitchen/cache/ dir with the host machine to reduce download times in you’re converge.

kitchen.local.yml -

driver:
  # Share a local folder
  synced_folders: [
    ["./chef-pkgs", "/tmp/chef-pkgs"]
]

provisioner:
  # curl accepts a local file:// url
  chef_omnibus_url: file:///tmp/chef-pkgs/install.sh

chef-pkgs/install.sh -

# Stub install.sh
# TODO: make this smarter, though works
# sudo dpkg etc.
sudo rpm -ivh /tmp/chef-pkgs/chef-11.12.8-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

I’ve also shared the /tmp/kitchen/cache, though this won’t cache yum/dpkg or if files are downloaded directly to other locations. If you want give it a try:

driver:
  # Share a local folder
  synced_folders: [
    ["./cache", "/tmp/kitchen/cache", 'owner: "vagrant", group: "vagrant"']
]

You can also checkout a way to setup a simple local http proxy in kitchen. I’ve gotten it to work, but usually forget to turn it on! https://gist.github.com/fnichol/7551540

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