It’s Chef 0.8.8 time, and the big news this release is that we fixed an issue where the remote directory resource was broken for users of Chef Solo. Sorry, guys – we’ve added tests to ensure this won’t happen again in the future. A special thanks to Jason Dusek, Michael Klishin, and Dmitriy Dzema for reporting the issue and helping us confirm the fix.

The Chef 0.8.8 MVP is Eric Hankins. Eric’s been a long-time contributor to Chef, and he spends lots of time helping people wrap their heads around it. In this release, Eric removed some overly-verbose debugging on the chef-server during file transfers. In addition, he added support for ensuring the validation and web ui keys are owned by the user the chef-server runs as, rather than root. Congratulations, Eric!

Renaud Chaput fixed an issue where we would append a ‘sudo’ when installing the chef-server gem from source. He also added a command line switch to control where the pid file gets dropped when you run Chef as a daemon.

Dylan Egan and Benjamin Black reported an issue with re-building search indexes – we now no longer try and index Web UI Users.

Since it’s always nice to have fun stuff in a release, we did ship with something fun. Chef 0.8.2 shipped with ssh integration, which was neat, but it wasn’t quite as useful as it could be. With this release, we now bring you integration with GNU Screen. If you do:

$ knife ssh 'role:something' screen 

You’ll get a new screen session, with a window for each system that matched your search query.

(Note, you need to have the Net::SSH::Multi and Highline gems installed for this)

Now, the release notes!

Release Notes – Chef – Version 0.8.8

Bug

• [CHEF-649] – cucumber.yml tags in —tags option must always start with @
• [CHEF-780] – Invalid file parameters of a cookbook upload request cause an authentication failure
• [CHEF-961] – Bad use of sudo in chef-server rake tasks
• [CHEF-965] – chef-server logs excessively regardless of the log_level setting
• [CHEF-1009] – "WebUIUser" fails to index, snake-casing name to invalid value.
• [CHEF-1014] – Remote directory does not work with chef-solo.
• [CHEF-1015] – Permission denied to /var/chef/ca/key.pem when running chef-server under non-root user
• [CHEF-1018] – chef-solr should report version

Improvement

• [CHEF-909] – Rollback on deploy errors
• [CHEF-959] – Add a command-line switch for the pid_file option
• [CHEF-1020] – Features tests should not start a merb inside the cucumber process
• [CHEF-1021] – Pass environment, group and cwd to run on deploy
• [CHEF-1033] – knife ssh should be able to use screen for real interactivity

New Feature

• [CHEF-1022] – chef-* commands should support -P or —pidfile that sets Chef::Config[:pid_file]