About V2

Serverspec/Specinfra v2 has been just released. See the document about v2.

About

With Serverspec, you can write RSpec tests for checking your servers are configured correctly.

Serverspec tests your servers’ actual state by executing command locally, via SSH, via WinRM, via Docker API and so on. So you don’t need to install any agent softwares on your servers and can use any configuration management tools, Puppet, Ansible, CFEngine, Itamae and so on.

But the true aim of Serverspec is to help refactoring infrastructure code.

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'serverspec'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install serverspec

Getting Started

$ serverspec-init
Select OS type:

  1) UN*X
  2) Windows

Select number: 1

Select a backend type:

  1) SSH
  2) Exec (local)

Select number: 1

Vagrant instance y/n: n
Input target host name: www.example.jp
 + spec/
 + spec/www.example.jp/
 + spec/www.example.jp/sample_spec.rb
 + spec/spec_helper.rb
 + Rakefile
 + .rspec

spec/www.example.jp/sample_spec.rb is a sample spec file and its content is like this.

require 'spec_helper'

describe package('httpd'), :if => os[:family] == 'redhat' do
  it { should be_installed }
end

describe package('apache2'), :if => os[:family] == 'ubuntu' do
  it { should be_installed }
end

describe service('httpd'), :if => os[:family] == 'redhat' do
  it { should be_enabled }
  it { should be_running }
end

describe service('apache2'), :if => os[:family] == 'ubuntu' do
  it { should be_enabled }
  it { should be_running }
end

describe service('org.apache.httpd'), :if => os[:family] == 'darwin' do
  it { should be_enabled }
  it { should be_running }
end

describe port(80) do
  it { should be_listening }
end

You can write spec for testing servers like this.

Serverspec with SSH backend logs in to target servers as a user configured in ~/.ssh/config or a current user. If you’d like to change the user, please edit the below line in spec/spec_helper.rb.

options[:user] ||= Etc.getlogin

Run tests.

$ rake spec
/usr/bin/ruby -S rspec spec/www.example.jp/sample_spec.rb

Package "httpd"
  should be installed

Service "httpd"
  should be enabled
  should be running

Port "80"
  should be listening

Finished in 0.21091 seconds (files took 6.37 seconds to load)
4 examples, 0 failures

Remark

serverspec test suites are meant to be run against a single machine (or docker container).

In other words, you should not try to issue a single rspec command that would harvest and run tests against multiple machines or containers. You need to issue one rspec command for each of them.