Best practice for testing chef recipes?

Solution 1:

You might (also) look into Vagrant for this.
A video is showing how to use the combo of Vagrant and Chef cookbooks. And there's a dedicated page to Vagrant and Chef on the Opscode site (update 2015-01-23: page has gone...).

Solution 2:

There's the cucumber-chef ruby gem and a recently released book Nelson-Smith et al - "Test-driven Infrastructure with Chef" that makes use of that gem - http://www.cucumber-chef.org/

Just remembered this from my github watchlist: https://github.com/gregretkowski/vmth/

The VMTH (Virtual Machine Test Harness) provides a mechanism to unit-test your infrastructure automation - puppet policies, chef recipes, release deployment scripts, etc. It uses features of modern VM monitors (like qemu) to snapshot system state, and then reset that state after each test, so that a series of tests can be performed on a VM instance in rapid succession