Test Kitchen is an in-built Chef tool to test your recipes in a sandbox environment before moving it to production. We know that Chef does the provisioning and managing of infrastructure through code. A defect in the code can even change the production environment so we need an ISOLATED environment where we can test our infrastructure code without worrying about the after-effects and the Test kitchen provides this. The test kitchen also helps us to test our infrastructure code on any PLATFORM by creating an instance with the respective OS. System tests using InSpec is often performed using Test kitchen as it helps us to test all actions in a sandbox environment. For eg: installation of the “Apache “ server on a Windows system is tested in Test kitchen by actually installing it on a PROVISIONED Windows system.

.kitchen.yml created while generating a cookbook is the configuration file for the Test Kitchen. The test kitchen creates a sandbox environment using vagrant or docker.  We can create multiple kitchen INSTANCES using a SINGLE .kitchen.yml file. The Test Kitchen is now often used in the CI pipeline of the applications to run the tests faster.