Here’s this month’s round up of what happened in October across the Chef, Habitat, and InSpec open-source communities.
This month’s release of Chef 14 is Chef 14.6.47. In this release, we are rolling out some major improvements to the package size of Chef Client that resulted in a 50% size reduction on Linux/macOS and 12% on Windows. Chef 14 has a smaller footprint than even the end-of-life Chef 11, despite it being chock full of new functionality.
Chef 14.6.47 includes one new resource, timezone, which allows you to modify the timezone of the system. It also bundles InSpec 3.0 for use in the audit cookbook. For more information, review the full release notes.
ChefDK 3.4.38 includes the new version of Chef and also benefits from the same improvements we made to reduce the package size. In this case, we achieved a nearly a 25% reduction in the size of ChefDK.
We released Habitat three times this month with several new features. Chief amongst them is a hab pkg uninstall command which starts to let you take control over longer-lived /hab/pkgs (or \hab\pkgs, if you’re on Windows) directories. This feature isn’t quite done — right now it just uninstalls the named package rather than handling dependencies — but it’s a great start.
We also released a new version of the Launcher (the supervisor’s supervisor) to deal with some signal handling bugs. We are also formalizing the supervisor’s HTTP API with longer-lived, properly-defined JSON schema, which should allow for more stable integration with metrics and monitoring systems.
Finally, after much experimentation over the last year or so, we are shelving the implementation of composite packages for now. Read this blog post for more details.
This was a big month for InSpec as we released version 3 at the London Community Summit. Have a look at the release announcement for all the information on that. The latest version of InSpec is InSpec 3.0.9 which we released in mid-October to include some bugfixes and minor features that didn’t make it into 3.0 proper.