Setting a variable based on enviroment in chef

Question

I am having trouble setting a variable on a template based on the result of node.chef_environment. Current when I run kitchen converge the chef run errors out on restarting the nrpe service because NRPE is complaining that allowed_hosts is blank. This is my first take at ever writing a cookbook so please excuse any ugly things that I have done.

if node.chef_environment == "development" || node.chef_environment == "qa" || node.chef_environment == "vagrant"
        node.default['allowed_hosts'] = "ipaddr"
elsif node.chef_environment == "staging" || node.chef_environment  == "production"
        node.default['allowed_hosts'] = "ipaddr2"
end

case
when platform_family?("debian")
    package "nagios-nrpe-server"
    package "nagios-plugins-basic"
when platform_family?("rhel")
    package "nagios-nrpe"
    package "nagios-plugins-nrpe"
    package "net-snmp-utils"
else
    Chef::Application.fatal! "[nagios-nrpe client] unsupported platform family: #{node[:platform_family]}"
end

template "/etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg" do
    source "nrpe.cfg.erb"
    owner "root"
    group "root"
    mode "0644"
    variables( 
        :allowed_hosts => node.default['allowed_hosts'] 
    )
end

bash "wget" do
    code <<-EOH
    cd /usr/lib/nagios/
    wget --no-check-certificate remote_source
    EOH
end

directory "/usr/lib/nagios/plugins" do
    action :delete
    recursive true
end

execute "untar plugins" do
    cwd "/usr/lib/nagios/"
    command "tar zxvf cc_sys_nrpe.tar.gz"
end

directory "/usr/lib/nagios/plugins" do
    mode "777"
    recursive true
end

file "/usr/lib/nagios/cc_sys_nrpe.tar.gz" do
    action :delete
end

service "nagios-nrpe-server" do
    supports :status => true, :restart => true, :reload => true
    action :restart
end

Answer 1

To set your environment via test kitchen, add this to your .kitchen.yml:

provisioner:
  name: chef_solo
  solo_rb:
    environment: vagrant

or

provisioner:
  name: chef_zero
  client_rb:
    environment: vagrant

While you can set the environment name from recipe code, this will not fully apply the environment attributes or cookbook version constraints (though the latter is moot with solo).

Answer 2

So the problem ultimately was that test-kitchen is not configured to set node.chef_environment as "vagrant". I came this conclusion once I specifically set the node.chef_environment in the cookbook.