Knife Runlist Compare is is a Knife plugin which allows you, as the name suggests, to compare two Chef run_lists. It takes each run_list it is given, expands them into the list of recipes which would be executed on a node, and produces a diff of the differences between those recipe lists.

knife-runlist-compare is available on rubygems. Add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'knife-runlist-compare'

or install the gem manually:

gem install knife-runlist-compare

knife runlist compare RUNLIST_1 RUNLIST_2 (options)

The environment option allows you to specify the Chef environment to be used in the run_list expansion process (defaults to production)

-e ENV_NAME
--environment ENV_NAME

The datasource option allows you to specify whether to use the Chef Server (server) or local disk (disk) to load roles and recipes for run_list expansion

-d DATA_SOURCE
--data-source DATA_SOURCE

The context_lines option allows you to specify the number of lines of context to be shown around each item in the diff output (defaults to 10000)

-U CONTEXT_LINES
--context-lines CONTEXT_LINES

$ knife runlist compare 'role[Base]' 'role[NewBase]' -U 3
run_list role[Base] expands to the following recipes:
["foo", "bar::baz"]

run_list role[NewBase] expands to the following recipes:
["foo"]

The following is the diff of these run_lists:
 foo
-bar::baz