What is the difference between kitchen.yml and .kitchen.yml in chef?

Question

What is the difference between kitchen.yml and .kitchen.yml? Why that extra dot in the beginning? I can only find the below statement in google and nothing else to help.

As of test-kitchen 1.21.0, we now prefer kitchen.yml over .kitchen.yml. This preference applies to kitchen.local.yml as well. This is backward compatible so the dot versions continue to work.

Answer 1

Why that extra dot in the beginning?

Files starting with dot (.) are hidden files in GNU/Linux/*nix. So .kitchen.yml file is a hidden Kitchen configuration file.

What is the difference between kitchen.yml and .kitchen.yml?

There is no difference, except that the .kitchen.yml file is not visible (being hidden) in directory listing by default. Whereas kitchen.yml is a regular (visible) file.

Answer 2

It was felt that the kitchen config should be similar to other meta files in the cookbooks like Rakefile/Berksfile/PolicyFile.rb/metadata.rb/etc which were not hidden files. The .kitchen directory still makes sense to be hidden because that is .gitignored temporary state related to the running of the kitchen tests themselves, but the kitchen.yml file is something that should be easy for users to find and should not be hidden.