Here’s what happened in the Chef, Habitat and InSpec open-source communities over the last month.
Chef
The biggest news from the Chef project is that we released Chef 14, a faster and easier to use Chef. We’ve already covered all the major changes in a couple of blog posts and a webinar so we won’t delve into it again here. We are also on track to release ChefDK 3 by the end of April, which will include both Chef 14 and InSpec 2. Finally, on April 30, we bid a fond farewell to Chef 12, which becomes end-of-life.
Habitat
We released Habitat 0.55.0 near the end of March. This release has a number of new features. Most important is an upgrade to the Launcher, the process manager used by the Habitat supervisor. By design, the Launcher rarely changes unless there are major improvements or bugfixes, so this is a good time to update. The Habitat Builder also gained secrets support so you can inject sensitive information like database passwords or license keys into the build process.
Finally, authorization to Habitat Builder will no longer work using the old GitHub authentication tokens. You should instead generate a Habitat personal access token as mentioned in last month’s update. If you are suddenly getting authorization errors interacting with Habitat Builder, this is why.
InSpec
The InSpec team released several new versions over the last month, primarily to add AWS-related resources and enhance parameters that can be matched inside existing resources. We highly recommend upgrading to InSpec 2.1.54 if you are developing InSpec profiles for AWS cloud compliance. The following is a short list of new AWS resources released over the last month:
aws_s3_bucket_object
aws_sns_topics
aws_sns_subscription
aws_kms_key
aws_config_delivery_channel
aws_rds_instance
aws_s3_buckets
aws_route_tables
chocolatey_package
Notable enhancements include the ability to test an AWS account’s root user for presence of a hardware or virtual multi-factor authentication (MFA) device, as well as a significant expansion of the interface for fully testing AWS security group egress and ingress rules and the network configuration of your VPC.
Other
We released Test Kitchen 1.21 which moves to using kitchen.yml as the configuration file name rather than .kitchen.yml (with the leading period) for better consistency with the rest of Chef’s tools. The older name is still supported for backwards compatibility.
Community MVP
Every month we reward outstanding contributions from one of our community members across the Chef, Habitat and InSpec projects. These contributions do not necessarily need to include code; we want to recognize someone who has dedicated significant time and energy to strengthening our community.
This month we’d like to recognize Romain Sertelon, who is a tireless contributor to the Habitat community. Romain has submitted dozens of pull requests in the last year and provided countless hours of support in Slack. Recently, Romain contributed a substantial amount of work towards the core plans refresh without which would have taken twice as long. The support and code he gives to the community, the thoughtful comments he provides into the request-for-comments (RFC) process, and everything else he does embodies what a stellar community member looks like. In short, Romain works his ass off and the entire Habitat team would like to make sure he knows he is valued by the project.
Thanks for everything, Romain, and we’ll be in touch to get your mailing address so we can send you a special token of our appreciation.