kitchen-vagrant | A Test Kitchen Driver for Vagrant

I have had a number of issues recently with vagrant-berkshelf not syncing Chef cookbooks on an existing machine reliably. And, basically, when doing research on workarounds, I see something like:

vagrant-berkshelf is deprecated, use Test Kitchen instead.

My use case is that I have Vagrantfiles, used to build VMs and DigitalOcean droplets, that are hand-written and only use Chef to provision the VMs. I am most definitely approaching Chef as a user, not an author or tester of cookbooks.

So, I am in a case of Vagrant -> Chef, not Chef -> Vagrant.

When looking at Kitche-Vagrant, I see that:

The kitchen-vagrant driver for Kitchen generates a single Vagrantfile for each instance of Kitchen in a sandboxed directory..

My question is: if my workflow relies on hand-written, complex, Vagrantfiles, can I continue to use Chef as a provisioner without having to rely on vagrant-berkshelf?

Some of the possible alternatives I see are:

• mangle Test Kitchen configuration to work with my exiting Vagrantfile. I fear that this is not the intent of this tool and will not end well.

• use chef.cookbooks_path attribute in vagrant and let it take the place of vagrant-berkshelf.

• switch out provisioners and use say Vagrant->Ansible.

The Vagrantfile below is somewhat simplified, but the gist is that the Vagrantfile is in charge and Chef is just used to provision.

I'm trying to learn Ansible with Vagrant (Ubuntu/trusty64) and I'm trying to use test-kitchen to assert my setup.

The problem I am having is the Vagrant machine has an old version of Ruby (1.9.1) and therefore one of the dependencies (busser) fails to run. The error I am receiving is:

I need some lights about two concepts: roles and environments. I know what they stand for, nevertheless I don't quite figure out:

• Where should I set them up? On my workstation and then I need to upload them? Or I've to define them on my chef server?
• I've several recipes inside my recipes folder. Where should I define roles?

EDIT

Currently, I'm using this folder structure:

With the following software versions installed: Berkshelf - 2.0.18 Ruby - 2.2.2 Vagrant - 1.9.3 test-kitchen - 1.15.0 kitchen-vagrant - 1.1.0 Chef Server API version - 11.0.2

I am attempting to run test kitchen on my local system. In doing so, I have a berksfile that points to a chef_api :config with a single recipe apt