We started using Chef a while ago and one of the first steps we took was to use Docker instead of Vagrant for performing tests due to its faster setup.

After all this time I can say it was a nice experience and now our CI is happily testing out in minutes. So…

What do you need?

Basically, you need to install the latest ChefDK where the gem kitchen-dokken is installed by default. This gem enables lightweight tooling to use Docker containers for executing Kitchen.

Setup

After that, you just need to set up your kitchen.yml to use dokken as a driver like so:

driver:
  name: dokken
  chef_version: latest

transport:
  name: dokken

provisioner:
name: dokken

...

The transport and the provisioner are set to dokken so the kitchen will use the lighter tooling from the driver. Then you can set up your platform to test your cookbooks:

- name: ubuntu-16.04
    driver:
      image: ubuntu:16.04
      pid_one_command: /bin/systemd
      intermediate_instructions:
        - RUN /usr/bin/apt-get update