knife-inspect is a knife plugin that inspects your chef repo as it compares to what is on your chef server. You can inspect your entire repo, or individual components.

$ gem install knife-inspect
$ cd [chef repo]

knife inspect

knife cookbook inspect [--no-cookbooks --no-data-bags --no-data-bag-items --no-environments --no-roles]
knife cookbook inspect [COOKBOOK]

knife data bag inspect
knife data bag inspect [BAG]
knife data bag inspect [BAG] [ITEM]

knife environment inspect
knife environment inspect [ENVIRONMENT]

knife role inspect
knife role inspect [ROLE]

So far it checks if...

• your cookbooks are in sync
• you have uncommitted changes in a cookbook (assuming your cookbooks are in their own git repos)
• you have commits in a cookbook that haven't been pushed to your remote (assuming your cookbooks are in their own git repos)
• your data bags are in sync
• your data bag items are in sync
• your environments are in sync
• your roles are in sync

You can use the option switches to disable checking for a resource type when running knife inspect:

• --no-cookbooks
• --no-data-bags
• --no-data-bag-items
• --no-environments
• --no-roles

You can use it with your favorite Continuous Integration tool, it returns 0 when everything is in sync or 1 if it's not.

• It returns the proper return code, so you can use it with a Continuous Integration tool
• knife diff seems to expect local roles to be json files, knife-inspect supports both JSON and Ruby.
• It's my personal opinion, but I think the output from knife-inspect is more readable. Also I don't understand some of the errors I'm getting with knife diff (Only in .: clients for example)
• I actually didn't know there was a built-in knife diff command.

This gem is tested with Ruby 2.3 and has been tested with Chef 13, 12 and 11.

(in alphabetical order)

• Adam Sinnett (@quandrum)
• Eric Saxby (@sax)
• Dan Buch (@meatballhat)
• Kirt Fitzpatrick (@kirtfitzpatrick)
• Ben Hughes (@barn)
• Grégoire Seux (@kamaradclimber)
• Christian Höltje (@docwhat)

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Do not bump the version number
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create new Pull Request