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Chef 0.5.6

Look at what the Chef community has cooked up for you – a brand new release!

The Chef 0.5.6 release MVP is Sean Cribbs, of Radiant CMS fame. Sean has been a steady presence in the burgeoning Chef community – asking questions, filing bugs, and contributing patches. In this release he whipped up a particularly awesome addition to the debug output generated when a template has an error, along with fixing an embarrassing regular expression bug (who would have thought someone would name a file ‘http’? Clearly not me!). Thanks for the help, Sean, and keep up the good work.

This release also sees the first installment of the ‘Scratch Your Own Itch’ prize! John Hampton, CTO of CleanOffer, filed a pair of tickets: one to support enabling/disabling mount points and another to improve resource name parsing. He then followed them up with great patches. Thanks for scratching your own itch, John, and helping the rest of the Chef community out in the process.

Lest you think that Sean and John had all the fun, here is what the rest of us were up to:

Thom May (who continues to crank out awesome) added support for client side SSL certificates while also finding time to enable the following of 301 redirects.

New contributor Matthew Landauer, of OpenAustralia, provided a trio of FreeBSD patches, making our FreeBSD support significantly more robust. Glad to have you in the kitchen, Matthew!

From Opscode in this release:

Before I just give the you raw release notes, I want to give a special thanks to everyone who has been filing tickets. Every time you file a new ticket, be it for a bug, an improvement, or an entirely new feature, you help the Chef community immensely. Thanks, ticket filers.

Release Notes – Chef – Version 0.5.6

Bug

  • [CHEF-112] – FreeBSD service provider does not enable service in /etc/rc.conf if service_enable line is not already there
  • [CHEF-115] – Remote file resource appears to have reserved words that if used, lead to a 404 error
  • [CHEF-118] – FreeBSD package provider can not read the candidate version of the port "php5-mysql"
  • [CHEF-119] – FreeBSD service provider uses incorrect name for enabling MySQL server in /etc/rc.conf
  • [CHEF-126] – chef session_secret_key is hard-coded
  • [CHEF-132] – cron resource should check integer values and convert to string
  • [CHEF-138] – remote_directory doesn’t work
  • [CHEF-139] – log_level doesn’t affect the actual log level
  • [CHEF-141] – remote_file with URL source does not obey http 301 redirects
  • [CHEF-149] – chef-client banner

Improvement

  • [CHEF-102] – display template error line numbers to aid debugging
  • [CHEF-140] – Chef client should know how to use client certs
  • [CHEF-146] – Should be able to run features from scratch, starting couch and other deps
  • [CHEF-150] – Resource names are limited to one underscore
  • [CHEF-152] – The mount resource should be able to add/remove entries in /etc/fstab

New Feature

  • [CHEF-80] – rpm package provider
  • [CHEF-93] – mount / filesystem provider and resource type
  • [CHEF-130] – Cucumber integration testing

Adam Jacob

Adam Jacob is the CTO and co-founder of Chef.