Imagine you write a driver for Test Kitchen. It’s reasonable, if you want to check, if your driver is working before publishing it. But which approach to take? Building the gem and installing it locally, then manually trying to launch Test Kitchen with your driver, does not really feel the way to do it.

I write a Test Kitchen driver for Lxd and here how I solved the problem of testing. Obviously we start by adding a .kitchen.yml to our driver project, where we make Kitchen use our driver. My driver name is lxd, so my .kitchen.yml looks like that:

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---
driver:
  name: lxd

transport:
  name: lxd

Now when we try to run Kitchen we get the error, telling us that there is no such driver found.

$ kitchen list
>>>>>> ------Exception-------
>>>>>> Class: Kitchen::ClientError
>>>>>> Message: Could not load the 'lxd' driver from the load path. Please ensure that your driver
is installed as a gem or included in your Gemfile if using Bundler.
>>>>>> ----------------------
>>>>>> Please see .kitchen/logs/kitchen.log for more details
>>>>>> Also try running `kitchen diagnose --all` for configuration

Looking further into .kitchen/logs/kitchen.log reveals the exact error:

ERROR -- Kitchen: Message: cannot load such file -- kitchen/driver/lxd

Well, Kitchen cannot find the file, obviously, because it does not know where to look for. This file is in the lib directory of our driver repository. What we need to do now, is to tell Kitchen, that it should look also in lib directory. This can be done by adding lib directory to $LOAD_PATH global ruby variable. Thankfully Kitchen parses .kitchen.yml as an erb template, so we can just add these instructions at the top of the file:

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# Make sure the local copy of the driver is loaded
<% lib = File.expand_path('lib', __dir__) %>
<% $LOAD_PATH.unshift(lib) unless $LOAD_PATH.include?(lib) %>
---
driver:
  name: lxd

transport:
  name: lxd

And that’s it! Now when you run kitchen list again, you will see no error, but the list of kitchen instances.

Now you can continue with adding different tests to test/integration folder as usual, as if you are testing some completely random project, not connected to Test Kitchen, with Test Kitchen.

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