Running kitchen converge is part of your normal workflow when developing cookbooks? VMs are always local and Chef is run in solo mode? Annoyed by the unnecessary cookbook upload every time you run kitchen that takes longer than actually converging the node? Here is a hack for you, that makes kitchen use rsync instead of scp. The diff is based on…

kitchen.rsync.patch

diff --git a/lib/kitchen/provisioner/chef_base.rb b/lib/kitchen/provisioner/chef_base.rb
index 79235d4..bb4fccf 100644
--- a/lib/kitchen/provisioner/chef_base.rb
+++ b/lib/kitchen/provisioner/chef_base.rb
@@ -102,9 +102,7 @@ module Kitchen
       end
 
       def init_command
-        dirs = %w{cookbooks data data_bags environments roles}.
-          map { |dir| File.join(config[:root_path], dir) }.join(" ")
-        "#{sudo('rm')} -rf #{dirs} ; mkdir -p #{config[:root_path]}"
+        "mkdir -p #{config[:root_path]}"
       end
 
       def cleanup_sandbox
diff --git a/lib/kitchen/ssh.rb b/lib/kitchen/ssh.rb
index 95320e4..c1af10a 100644
--- a/lib/kitchen/ssh.rb
+++ b/lib/kitchen/ssh.rb
@@ -59,15 +59,20 @@ module Kitchen
     end
 
     def upload!(local, remote, options = {}, &progress)
-      if progress.nil?
-        progress = lambda { |ch, name, sent, total|
-          if sent == total
-            logger.debug("Uploaded #{name} (#{total} bytes)")
-          end
-        }
+      ssh_opts = session.options
+
+      additional_rsync_flags = "--delete-before --rsync-path='sudo rsync'"
+
+      if ::File.directory?(local)
+        local = "#{local}/"
+        remote = "#{remote}/#{::File.basename(local)}/"
+        if ::File.basename(local) == "cache"
+          additional_rsync_flags = ""
+        end
       end
 
-      session.scp.upload!(local, remote, options, &progress)
+      logger.info("Synchronizing #{local} -> #{remote}")
+      system("rsync #{additional_rsync_flags} -ire 'ssh -l #{ssh_opts[:user]} -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsfile=#{ssh_opts[:user_known_hosts_file]} -i #{ssh_opts[:keys].first} -p #{ssh_opts[:port]}' '#{local}' localhost:'#{remote}' >&2")
     end
 
     def upload_path!(local, remote, options = {}, &progress)