Chef Habitat Joins the Greater Chef Community

Chef Habitat is an open-source automation product for defining, packaging, and delivering applications to any environment, regardless of operating system or platform. Habitat was launched by Chef as a new project with its own stand-alone community site (habitat.sh) in 2016. Chef Habitat has continued to mature as a project and become the corner-stone of Chef’s Application Delivery Automation offering. 

In January 2020 we announced Chef Habitat 1.5 which delivered on Chef’s vision of providing a unified solution (Chef Enterprise Automation Stack) for infrastructure, security, and application automation. Both the Habitat Builder installer and the application dashboard were integrated with Chef Automate, providing a seamless experience for the entire automation stack.

In addition to working on integrating Chef Habitat with the rest of the Chef portfolio Chef is integrating the Chef Habitat Community site along with the rest of the Chef community. This will provide Chef users with a single source for all their Chef related product content and make navigating product integrations easier.

This is being done in three phases. 

Phase I –  Habitat Site Integration with Greater Chef Community

At Chef Conf 2020 the redesigned Chef Habitat Community site was launched, as an extension of the new Chef Community site that we launched in December. Anyone going to habitat.sh will be redirected to the new site. 

Phase II – Habitat Forums and Discourse Consolidation and Move to the Main Chef with the Main Chef Community Discourse

Chef Habitat currently has its own slack and forums, independent from the Chef Slack and Discourse. Soon, we will be closing the Habitat Slack and Forums and merge in with the rest of the Chef community, reduce the number of places that require attention, and streamline our community engagement.

Phase III – Habitat Document Consolidation

The Chef documentation team’s 2020 project is the consolidation of all the Chef product technical documentation in one site, docs.chef.io. They have already finished bringing Chef Automate and Chef InSpec into the site and they are about to start work on converting the Chef Habitat documentation. Look for a post from them in the coming weeks about the changes!

Timeline for Slack and Forums

October 22nd will be the last day that the Habitat Slack and Forums are live. Today’s announcement marks the first public step forward, and on October 1st, we’ll disable new user signups for both Habitat Slack and Forums. If all goes according to plan, by October 15th we’ll have all integrations moved over and will disable the creation of new threads on the forums. On October 22nd we’ll close everything up, and on October 29th we’ll add in all of the appropriate redirects. 

Here’s a high-level overview of some of the other steps I’ll be taking, working with the internal and external Habitat community members:

• Integration audit and migrations
  • There are a lot of integrations hooked into slack and discourse right now that will need to be duplicated or retired as part of this move.
• Retaining historical data
  • The existing content from the Habitat forums will be merged in to the Chef forums, and the most frequently referenced threads on the Habitat forums will be redirected to the appropriate new URL on the Chef forums.
  • I’ll download a copy of the habitat slack history before I delete the space so anything that is available on that day will be retained, in case we need it.
• New user info overload
  • If you’re used to the relative quiet of the Habitat Slack and Forums, the traffic on the Chef ones might seem overwhelming at first. Slack and Discourse both allow you to only get notifications for only the channels you care about most.

Next Steps

If you haven’t already, the next step for Habitat community members is to sign up for an account on the Chef Questions discourse forum, and join the Chef Slack. If there are notes or pinned messages that are important to you in the Habitat communities, let me know so we can get them moved over! We’ll make sure they remain part of the history. If you have questions, requests, or concerns about this shift, or just want to chat, feel free to email me or ping me on either slack! I look forward to hearing from y’all.