Here’s this month’s round up of what happened in September across the Chef, Habitat, and InSpec open-source communities.
This month’s release of Chef 14 is Chef 14.5.33, which includes two new resources: windows_workgroup, which allows you to modify the system’s Windows workgroup, and locale, which sets the system locale. Thank you to community members Derek Groh and Vincent Aubert, respectively, for contributing these resources. Chef 14.5.33 also resolves a security vulnerability (CVE-2018-1000544) with the bundled rubyzip gem.
ChefDK 3.3 which we released simultaneously contains the latest version of Chef 14.
Finally, we also released Chef 13.11.3 for users who are still on Chef 13 which backports some of the fixes for sensitive properties in windows_service and windows_package to this version of Chef. Chef 13.11.3 is also a security release to resolve several vulnerabilities in the bundled OpenSSL.
This month’s releases of Habitat add two new features: sending a SIGHUP to the supervisor will now shut down only the supervisor but keep user processes running, allowing easier supervisor upgrades; and binlinking on Windows has been implemented.
We also published a blog post from community member Blake Irvin on caching package dependencies during local studio builds, which speeds up development iterations.
We released InSpec twice during the month of September. The latest release of InSpec, 2.2.101, includes several new enhancements, including the ability to specify CVSS-compatible string values (none, low, medium, high, critical) for control impact rather than floating-point numbers. InSpec 2.2.101 also includes a new global attributes system that allows attributes to be specified at the profile level that can be used in any control. Finally, the inspec.yml is now treated as an ERB template and you can use embedded Ruby within it.