There's a vanilla Chef repo you can clone to store cookbooks, roles, and data bags in source control [0]. For testing on local VMs there's Opscode's bento [1],

There's a vanilla Chef repo you can clone to store cookbooks, roles, and data bags in source control [0]. For testing on local VMs there's Opscode's bento [1], which automates creating Vagrant baseboxes and running recipes. You can specify using Chef Solo to do this, which speeds up testing significantly as it removes chatting to remote Chef or Hosted Chef servers. [0] https://github.com/opscode/chef-repo https://github.com/opscode/chef-repo [1] https://github.com/opscode/bento https://github.com/opscode/bento