Recently I hit a snag while using a community vagrant box to test an Ansible role using test-kitchen.

At the point at which test-kitchen would attempt to install ansible, it would complain that the package “ansible” was not a valid package. Apparently this is due to the fact that you need to install the epel-release package prior to installing ansible.

Annoyingly, the VM did not already have epel-release installed, and I needed a workaround for this.

In the kitchen-vagrant documentation there is mention of a vagrantfiles property. This allows you to merge custom vagrant configuration into the vagrantfile that test-kitchen generates behind the scenes.

Create a file called vagrant.rb and place it in the same directory as .kitchen.yml .

vagrant.rb

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
     sudo yum install -y epel-release
     sudo yum install -y ansible
  SHELL
end

.kitchen.yml

platforms:
  - name: centos-7.0
    driver:
      box: centos7-64
      provision: true
      vagrantfiles:
        - vagrant.rb

This functionality has a wide range of uses, which could include adding new NICS or disks independently of the base box.