.kitchen.local.yml and when you want to use it

I recently bought the vagrant vmware fusion plugin to start testing out test-kitchen for mac. Good ol’ Fletcher made it ridiculously easy to do and I thank him for that. Interestingly enough though in the process of figuring it out I ran into a problem. I have a few other .kitchen.yml files in different cookbooks, and I wanted to start leveraging what I just paid for.

So take this .kitchen.yml for instance:

---
driver:
  name: vagrant

provisioner:
  name: chef_solo

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-12.04

suites:
  - name: default
    run_list:
      - recipe[hubot-solo::default]
    attributes:

Yep, it runs off the default of virtualbox. If you create a .kitchen.local.yml file in that directory, something like this:

---
driver:
  name: vagrant
  provider: vmware_fusion

provisioner:
  name: chef_solo

platforms:
  - name: ubuntu-12.04

suites:
  - name: default
    run_list:
      - recipe[hubot-solo::default]
    attributes:

It’ll run it with vmare as the hypervisor or provider, in kitchen lingo.

That’s all fine and dandy, but what about an over arching config? I thought you could create something like ~/.kitchen.local.yml that didn’t seem to work.

I pinged #kitchenci and teukka gave me the answer: set/export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=vmware_fusion env var (in your shell’s rc file), and boom, it worked.

So, long story short: if you want to have a specific change that overrides the default .kitchen.yml make a .kitchen.local.yml in the directory, but if you want to override every hypervisor use export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=vmware_fusion in your bashrc/zshrc.

I hope this helps someone making the conversion from virtualbox to vmware.