Here’s this month’s roundup of all the news from across Chef’s open source projects for the month of March.
Chef
With only another two weeks to go until the official release of Chef 14, the team is hard at work on merging in the last features with the stretch goal of hitting 30 new resources. (There are already at least 20 new ones since Chef 13.) In the meantime:
- Chef Client 13.8.5 was released to fix the attributes regression from Chef Client 13.7.
- Chef Client 12.22.31 was released with a few backported features. This is likely to be the last version of Chef Client 12 before its end-of-life on April 30, 2018.
- Chef Server 12.17.33 was released with a few minor fixes, updating Ruby to 2.4.3 as well as making sure FIPS mode for Linux on POWER (ppc64) works again.
- A major version of the Windows cookbook was released with significant modernization of Windows resources. Note that in Chef 14, you won’t need the Windows cookbook anymore, as all of these resources are imported into core Chef.
Habitat
Habitat implemented personal access tokens in the Builder service itself, which are intended to replace GitHub personal access tokens. This is one of the steps needed to eventually provide more flexibility in how you connect Habitat with your source code repository as well.
We also published a blog post about how you can use Habitat to build and export packages for Pivotal Cloud Foundry without the need for BOSH. Have a look here: https://www.habitat.sh/blog/2018/03/habitat-cloudfoundry/
InSpec
We released InSpec 2.1, with one behavior change since InSpec 2.0: enabling the backend profile cache by default. A few other features and bug fixes made it in: for example, the Homebrew package resource detector was fixed; you can now test AWS Configuration Recorder with InSpec 2’s cloud API feature; and cloud API pagination works now so large result sets are properly retrieved.
Other
We released ChefDK 2.5 which catches up on many ecosystem changes in Test Kitchen, Foodcritic, and so on. We have been getting a few questions about when InSpec 2.0 will be making it into ChefDK. Since it is a breaking change with respect to InSpec 1 which is currently in the ChefDK, it will only ship in the ChefDK 3 series due out in April.
ChefSpec’s coverage reporting is being removed because it creates the wrong incentives (people aiming for 100% test coverage rather than writing good tests). See this post from Noah Kantrowitz for more information .
Community MVP
We are starting a monthly community MVP program with one MVP awarded across all Chef’s major open-source projects. This is somewhat like “Awesome Chefs” on a smaller scale and focused on folks that have contributed time and energy to foster community. This can but does not need to include contributing code; we ask for nominations from each project’s developer advocate and select a winner, who receives a personalized thank-you gift from Chef’s VP of Community Development, Nathen Harvey.
This month’s winner is David Alexander from the InSpec community. His nomination reads: “David is a beacon of wisdom and guidance. Mornings, nights, weekends, it doesn’t matter; @thelonelyghost is there to help in #inspec on the Chef Community Slack. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear he was a member of the core development team.”
Thank you so much, David, for your amazing dedication to InSpec, and we’ll be in touch to get your mailing address.