#Help test the future of Windows Infrastructure Testing on Test-Kitchen

Update: Test-Kitchen beta is here! See this post for an example using the latest prerelease gems.

I've posted about using Test-Kitchen on Windows a couple times. See this post and this one too. Both of these posts include rather fragile instructions on how to prepare your environment in order to make this possible. Writing them feels like handing out scissors and then encouraging people to run on newly oiled floors generously sprinkled with legos while transporting said scissors. Then, if they are lucky, their windows nodes will converge and kick off tests ready for their review once they reach "the other side." Its dangerous. Its exciting. Pain may be an active ingredient.

Well development has been ramping up in this effort. Some of the outside forks have now been merged into a dedicated branch of the official Test-Kitchen repo - windows-guest-support and its been rebased with the latest master branch of Test-Kitchen. A group of folks from within and outside of chef including test-kitchen creator Fletcher Nichol as well as Salim Afiune who got the ball rolling on windows compatibility meet regularly to discuss progress and bugs. I'm honored to be involved and contributed the winrm based file copying logic (future blog post pending - my wounds have not yet fully healed).

I can't wait until the day that no special instructions are required and we think that day is not far off but here is an update on how to get up and running with the latest bits. Lots have changed since my last post but I think its much simpler now.

What to install and where to get it