it always invokes tests as root

[JigarJoshi]

in my .kitchen.yml file I have

username: some-user-name

and I have a test

@test "whoami" {
  whoami > /tmp/1.txt
}

after this if I do kitchen login and cat /tmp/1.txt it prints root

when I do kitchen login it logs in as some-user-name

[sethvargo]

@JigarJoshi this is the expected behavior. Serverspec and bats should be run as root, because they often require unrestricted access to read and write from the filesystem. Without that permission level, you would be unable to test many pieces of the system.

Because of the way EC2 instances are provisioned, the "login user" may vary. On Ubuntu, it's ubuntu, but it's root on some other systems. You can read more about it here: http://alestic.com/2014/01/ec2-ssh-username