Here are this month’s updates from the Chef, Habitat, and InSpec open-source communities. Despite the fact that we at Chef Software were busy preparing for ChefConf – which had its own raft of product announcements, including the release of Chef Automate 2 – we also managed to accomplish a lot in the open-source world.
Chef
Due to some last-minute regressions, it took a bit of time for us to release ChefDK 3, but it finally arrived on May 21st. Of note in this release are the inclusion of Chef 14 and InSpec 2, thus necessitating the major version number bump. Many other changes are included, such as newer versions of Test Kitchen, ChefSpec, Foodcritic, Cookstyle, and Berkshelf. You can read about these and many of the other improvements in ChefDK here.
We released Chef Client 14.1.12 on May 16th, which fixes a few regressions in Chef 14. Of particular note is that if you are running Chef in FIPS 140-2 environments, this is the version of Chef 14 you want to use, as we needed to correct some incompatibilities between Ohai and FIPS 140-2 mode. Also, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now supported, and we said goodbye to macOS 10.10 which is now end-of-life.
Finally, we released Chef Client 13.9 for those of you who are still on Chef 13. In addition to the usual set of bugfixes, we have backported many of the custom resource improvements in Chef 14 to Chef 13.
Habitat
There were many Habitat announcements at ChefConf 2018: the Habitat exporter for Helm and Azure Kubernetes Service, the Open Service Broker reference implementation, and the general availability of Habitat on-premise. The team has also been preparing for a major release of the Habitat supervisor to be released shortly: you should read their post on what breaking changes will be in the forthcoming Habitat 0.56.0.
InSpec
The team released InSpec twice, mostly comprising bug fixes, but if you are looking for InSpec to check that your AWS S3 buckets are encrypted, you will want to upgrade to InSpec version 2.1.67 or greater. All of the InSpec projects including Train (the transport interface), InSpec experimental plugins, and InSpec itself now live under the InSpec GitHub organization.
At ChefConf we also announced InSpec for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) support in beta, with similar functionality to the AWS and Azure features already in core InSpec. If you use GCP, we would love if you check out the GitHub repository. Just like how InSpec AWS and InSpec Azure were developed, we will merge GCP support back into InSpec core when it is ready.
Finally, we released, into incubation, InSpec-Iggy, an experimental InSpec plugin that allows you to generate InSpec controls from a Hashicorp Terraform state file.
Miscellaneous
Supermarket 3.1.68 is out, with a few small enhancements including bumping the version of Ruby to 2.5.1.
Chef Software is now maintaining three new Windows-related cookbooks, chocolatey_config, chocolatey_source, and windows_firewall, with an eye to refactoring them for inclusion into core Chef. If you have opinions about how these resources should be improved, head on over to the respective GitHub repositories.
The Sous Chefs team has been busy during the month of May, taking ownership of several popular cookbooks such as java and haproxy. They’ve also completed a major refactor of the PostgreSQL cookbook to make it custom resource-oriented. Finally, the Sublime and Atom editor plugins for Chef are now Sous Chefs projects as well.
Finally, if you are looking for the notes from the community summit held last week as part of ChefConf 2018 in Chicago, they can be found here on GitHub.
Community award
In light of the fact that we recognized three awesome community Chefs just last week at ChefConf, we are skipping the separate monthly award as part of this post. But please join us again in congratulating Dan Webb, Romain Sertelon, Edmund Haselwanter, Tim Smith, and Joshua Timberman for their incredible contributions to the open-source community.