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This file holds "in progress" release notes for the current release under development and is intended for consumption by the Chef Documentation team. Please see https://docs.chef.io/release_notes.html for the official Chef release notes.

Knife configuration profile management commands

Several new commands have been added under knife config to help manage multiple profiles in your credentials file.

knife config get-profile will display the active profile.

knife config use-profile PROFILE will set the workstation-level default profile. That default can still be overridden by the --profile command line option or the $CHEF_PROFILE environment variable.

knife config list-profiles will display all your available profiles along with summary information on each.

$ knife config get-profile
staging
$ knife config use-profile prod
Set default profile to prod
$ knife config list-profiles
 Profile  Client  Key               Server
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 staging  myuser  ~/.chef/user.pem  https://example.com/organizations/staging
*prod     myuser  ~/.chef/user.pem  https://example.com/organizations/prod

Chef Client Release Notes 14.3:

New Preview Resources Concept

This release of Chef introduces the concept of Preview Resources. Preview resources behave the same as a standard resource built into Chef, except Chef will load a resource with the same name from a cookbook instead of the built-in preview resource.

What does this mean for you? It means we can introduce new resources in Chef without breaking existing behavior in your infrastructure. For instance if you have a cookbook with a resource named manage_everything and a future version of Chef introduced a preview resource named manage_everything you will continue to receive the resource from your cookbook. That way outside of a major release your won't experience a potentially breaking behavior change from the newly included resource.

Then when we perform our yearly major release we'll remove the preview designation from all resources, and the built in resources will take precedence over resources with the same names in cookbooks.

New Resources

chocolatey_config

Use the chocolatey_config resource to add or remove Chocolatey configuration keys."

Actions

  • set - Sets a Chocolatey config value.
  • unset - Unsets a Chocolatey config value.

Properties

  • config_key - The name of the config. We'll use the resource's name if this isn't provided.
  • value - The value to set.

chocolatey_source

Use the chocolatey_source resource to add or remove Chocolatey sources.

Actions

  • add - Adds a Chocolatey source.
  • remove - Removes a Chocolatey source.

Properties

  • source_name - The name of the source to add. We'll use the resource's name if this isn't provided.
  • source - The source URL.
  • bypass_proxy - Whether or not to bypass the system's proxy settings to access the source.
  • priority - The priority level of the source.

powershell_package_source

Use the powershell_package_source resource to register a powershell package repository.

Actions

  • register - Registers and updates the powershell package source.
  • unregister - Unregisters the powershell package source.

Properties

  • source_name - The name of the package source.
  • url - The url to the package source.
  • trusted - Whether or not to trust packages from this source.
  • provider_name - The package management provider for the source. It supports the following providers: 'Programs', 'msi', 'NuGet', 'msu', 'PowerShellGet', 'psl' and 'chocolatey'.
  • publish_location - The url where modules will be published to for this source. Only valid if the provider is 'PowerShellGet'.
  • script_source_location - The url where scripts are located for this source. Only valid if the provider is 'PowerShellGet'.
  • script_publish_location - The location where scripts will be published to for this source. Only valid if the provider is 'PowerShellGet'.

kernel_module

Use the kernel_module resource to manage kernel modules on Linux systems. This resource can load, unload, blacklist, install, and uninstall modules.

Actions

  • install - Load kernel module, and ensure it loads on reboot.
  • uninstall - Unload a kernel module and remove module config, so it doesn't load on reboot.
  • blacklist - Blacklist a kernel module.
  • load - Load a kernel module.
  • unload - Unload kernel module

Properties

  • modname - The name of the kernel module.
  • load_dir - The directory to load modules from.
  • unload_dir - The modprobe.d directory.

ssh_known_hosts_entry

Use the ssh_known_hosts_entry resource to add an entry for the specified host in /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts or a user's known hosts file if specified.

Actions

  • create - Create an entry in the ssh_known_hosts file.
  • flush - Immediately flush the entries to the config file. Without this the actual writing of the file is delayed in the Chef run so all entries can be accumulated before writing the file out.

Properties

  • host - The host to add to the known hosts file.
  • key - An optional key for the host. If not provided this will be automatically determined.
  • key_type - The type of key to store.
  • port - The server port that the ssh-keyscan command will use to gather the public key.
  • timeout - The timeout in seconds for ssh-keyscan.
  • mode - The file mode for the ssh_known_hosts file.
  • owner- The file owner for the ssh_known_hosts file.
  • group - The file group for the ssh_known_hosts file.
  • hash_entries - Hash the hostname and addresses in the ssh_known_hosts file for privacy.
  • file_location - The location of the ssh known hosts file. Change this to set a known host file for a particular user.

New knife config get command

The knife config get command has been added to help with debugging configuration issues with knife and other tools that use the knife.rb file.

With no arguments, it will display all options you've set:

$ knife config get
Loading from configuration file /Users/.../.chef/knife.rb
chef_server_url: https://...
client_key:      /Users/.../.chef/user.pem
config_file:     /Users/.../.chef/knife.rb
log_level:       warn
log_location:    STDERR
node_name:       ...
validation_key:

You can also pass specific keys to only display those knife config get node_name client_key, or use --all to display everything (including options that are using the default value).

Simplification of shell_out APIs

The following helper methods have been deprecated in favor of the single shell_out helper:

  • shell_out_with_systems_locale
  • shell_out_with_timeout
  • shell_out_compact
  • shell_out_compact_timeout
  • shell_out_with_systems_locale!
  • shell_out_with_timeout!
  • shell_out_compact!
  • shell_out_compact_timeout!

The functionality of shell_out_with_systems_locale has been implemented using the default_env: false option that removes the PATH and locale mangling that has been the default behavior of shell_out.

The functionality of shell_out_compact has been folded into shell_out. The shell_out API when called with varargs has its arguments flatted, compacted and coerced to strings. This style of calling is encouraged over using strings and building up commands using join(" ") since it avoids shell interpolation and edge conditions in the construction of spaces between arguments. The varargs form is still not supported on Windows.

The functionality of shell_out*timeout has also been folded into shell_out. Users writing Custom Resources should be explicit for Chef-14: shell_out!("whatever", timeout: new_resource.timeout) which will become automatic in Chef-15.

Silencing deprecation warnings

While deprecation warnings have been great for the Chef community to ensure cookbooks are kept up-to-date and to prepare for major version upgrades, sometimes you just can't fix a deprecation right now. This is often compounded by the recommendation to enable treat_deprecation_warnings_as_errors mode in your Test Kitchen integration tests, which doesn't understand the difference between deprecations from community cookbooks and those from your own code.

Two new options are provided for silencing deprecation warnings: silence_deprecation_warnings and inline chef:silence_deprecation comments.

The silence_deprecation_warnings configuration value can be set in your client.rb or solo.rb config file, either to true to silence all deprecation warnings or to an array of deprecations to silence. You can specify which to silence either by the deprecation key name (e.g. "internal_api"), the numeric deprecation ID (e.g. 25 or "CHEF-25"), or by specifying the filename and line number where the deprecation is being raised from (e.g. "default.rb:67").

An example of setting the silence_deprecation_warnings option in your client.rb or solo.rb:

silence_deprecation_warnings %w{deploy_resource chef-23 recipes/install.rb:22}

or in your kitchen.yml:

provisioner:
  name: chef_solo
  solo_rb:
    treat_deprecation_warnings_as_errors: true
    silence_deprecation_warnings:
    - deploy_resource
    - chef-23
    - recipes/install.rb:22

You can also silence deprecations using a comment on the line that is raising the warning:

erl_call 'something' do # chef:silence_deprecation

We advise caution in the use of this feature, as excessive or prolonged silencing can lead to difficulty upgrading when the next major release of Chef comes out.

Misc Windows improvements

  • A new skip_publisher_check property has been added to the powershell_package resource
  • windows_feature_powershell now supports Windows 2008 R2
  • The mount resource now supports the mount_point property on Windows
  • windows_feature_dism no longer errors when specifying the source
  • Resolved idempotency issues in the windows_task resource and prevented setting up a task with bad credentials
  • windows_service no longer throws Ruby deprecation warnings

Newly Introduced Deprecations

CHEF-26: Deprecation of old shell_out APIs

As noted above, this release of Chef unifies our shell_out helpers into just shell_out and shell_out!. Previous helpers are now deprecated and will be removed in Chef 15.

See CHEF-26 Deprecation Page for details.

Legacy FreeBSD pkg provider

Chef 15 will remove support for the legacy FreeBSD pkg format. We will continue to support the pkgng format introduced in FreeBSD 10.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.2:

ssh-agent support for user keys

You can now use ssh-agent to hold your user key when using knife. This allows storing your user key in an encrypted form as well as using ssh -A agent forwarding for running knife commands from remote devices.

You can enable this by adding ssh_agent_signing true to your knife.rb or ssh_agent_signing = true in your credentials file.

To encrypt your existing user key, you can use OpenSSL:

( openssl rsa -in user.pem -pubout && openssl rsa -in user.pem -aes256 ) > user_enc.pem
chmod 600 user_enc.pem

This will prompt you for a passphrase for to use to encrypt the key. You can then load the key into your ssh-agent by running ssh-add user_enc.pem. Make sure you add the ssh_agent_signing to your configuration, and update your client_key to point at the new, encrypted key (and once you've verified things are working, remember to delete your unencrypted key file).

default_env Property in Execute Resource

The shell_out helper has been extended with a new option default_env to allow disabling Chef from modifying PATH and LOCALE environmental variables as it shells out. This new option defaults to true (modify the env), preserving the previous behavior of the helper.

The execute resource has also been updated with a new property default_env that allows utilizing this the ENV sanity functionality in shell_out. The new property defaults to false, but it can be set to true in order to ensure a sane PATH and LOCALE when shelling out. If you find that binaries cannot be found when using the execute resource, default_env set to true may resolve those issues.

Small Size on Disk

Chef now bundles the inspec-core and train-core gems, which omit many cloud dependencies not needed within the Chef client. This change reduces the install size of a typical system by ~22% and the number of files within that installation by ~20% compared to Chef 14.1. Enjoy the extra disk space.

Virtualization detection on AWS

Ohai now detects the virtualization hypervisor amazonec2 when running on Amazon's new C5/M5 instances.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.1.12:

This release resolves a number of regressions in 14.1:

  • git resource: don't use --prune-tags as it's really new.
  • rhsm_repo resource: now works
  • apt_repository resource: use the repo_name property to name files
  • windows_task resource: properly handle commands with arguments
  • windows_task resource: handle creating tasks as the SYSTEM user
  • remote_directory resource: restore the default for the overwrite property

Ohai 14.1.3

  • Properly detect FIPS environments
  • shard plugin: work in FIPS compliant environments
  • filesystem plugin: Handle BSD platforms

Chef Client Release Notes 14.1.1:

Platform Additions

Enable Ubuntu-18.04 and Debian-9 tested chef-client packages.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.1:

Windows Task

The windows_task resource has been entirely rewritten. This resolves a large number of bugs, including being able to correctly set the start time of tasks, proper creation and deletion of tasks, and improves Chef's validation of tasks. The rewrite will also solve the idempotency problems that users have reported.

build_essential

The build_essential resource no longer requires a name, similar to the apt_update resource.

Ignore Failure

The ignore_failure property takes a new argument, :quiet, to suppress the error output when the resource does in fact fail.

This release of Chef Client 14 resolves a number of regressions in 14.0

  • On Windows, the installer now correctly re-extracts files during repair mode
  • Fix a number of issues relating to use with Red Hat Satellite
  • Git fetch now prunes remotes before running
  • Fix locking and unlocking packages with apt and zypper
  • Ensure we don't request every remote file when running with lazy loading enabled
  • The sysctl resource correctly handles missing keys when used with ignore_error
  • --recipe-url apparently never worked on Windows. Now it does.

Security Updates

ffi Gem

  • CVE-2018-1000201: DLL loading issue which can be hijacked on Windows OS

Ohai Release Notes 14.1:

Configurable DMI Whitelist

The whitelist of DMI IDs is now user configurable using the additional_dmi_ids configuration setting, which takes an Array.

Shard plugin

The Shard plugin has been returned to a default plugin rather than an optional one. To ensure we work in FIPS environments, the plugin will use SHA256 rather than MD5 in those environments.

SCSI plugin

A new plugin to enumerate SCSI devices has been added. This plugin is optional.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.0.202:

This release of Chef 14 resolves several regressions in the Chef 14.0 release.

  • Resources contained in cookbooks would be used instead of built-in Chef client resources causing older resources to run
  • Resources failed due to a missing property_is_set? and resources methods
  • yum_package changed the order of disablerepo and enablerepo options
  • Depsolving large numbers of cookbooks with chef zero/local took a very long time

Chef Client Release Notes 14.0:

New Resources

Chef 14 includes a large number of resources ported from community cookbooks. These resources have been tested, improved, and had their functionality expanded. With these new resources in the Chef Client itself, the need for external cookbook dependencies and dependency management has been greatly reduced.

build_essential

Use the build_essential resource to install packages required for compiling C software from source. This resource was ported from the build-essential community cookbook.

Note: This resource no longer configures msys2 on Windows systems.

chef_handler

Use the chef_handler resource to install or uninstall Chef reporting/exception handlers. This resource was ported from the chef_handler community cookbook.

dmg_package

Use the dmg_package resource to install a dmg 'package'. The resource will retrieve the dmg file from a remote URL, mount it using hdiutil, copy the application (.app directory) to the specified destination (/Applications), and detach the image using hdiutil. The dmg file will be stored in the Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]. This resource was ported from the dmg community cookbook.

homebrew_cask

Use the homebrew_cask resource to install binaries distributed via the Homebrew package manager. This resource was ported from the homebrew community cookbook.

homebrew_tap

Use the homebrew_tap resource to add additional formula repositories to the Homebrew package manager. This resource was ported from the homebrew community cookbook.

hostname

Use the hostname resource to set the system's hostname, configure hostname and hosts config file, and re-run the Ohai hostname plugin so the hostname will be available in subsequent cookbooks. This resource was ported from the chef_hostname community cookbook.

macos_userdefaults

Use the macos_userdefaults resource to manage the macOS user defaults system. The properties of this resource are passed to the defaults command, and the parameters follow the convention of that command. See the defaults(1) man page for details on how the tool works. This resource was ported from the mac_os_x community cookbook.

ohai_hint

Use the ohai_hint resource to pass hint data to Ohai to aid in configuration detection. This resource was ported from the ohai community cookbook.

openssl_dhparam

Use the openssl_dhparam resource to generate dhparam.pem files. If a valid dhparam.pem file is found at the specified location, no new file will be created. If a file is found at the specified location but it is not a valid dhparam file, it will be overwritten. This resource was ported from the openssl community cookbook.

openssl_rsa_private_key

Use the openssl_rsa_private_key resource to generate RSA private key files. If a valid RSA key file can be opened at the specified location, no new file will be created. If the RSA key file cannot be opened, either because it does not exist or because the password to the RSA key file does not match the password in the recipe, it will be overwritten. This resource was ported from the openssl community cookbook.

openssl_rsa_public_key

Use the openssl_rsa_public_key resource to generate RSA public key files given a RSA private key. This resource was ported from the openssl community cookbook.

rhsm_errata

Use the rhsm_errata resource to install packages associated with a given Red Hat Subscription Manager Errata ID. This is helpful if packages to mitigate a single vulnerability must be installed on your hosts. This resource was ported from the redhat_subscription_manager community cookbook.

rhsm_errata_level

Use the rhsm_errata_level resource to install all packages of a specified errata level from the Red Hat Subscription Manager. For example, you can ensure that all packages associated with errata marked at a 'Critical' security level are installed. This resource was ported from the redhat_subscription_manager community cookbook.

rhsm_register

Use the rhsm_register resource to register a node with the Red Hat Subscription Manager or a local Red Hat Satellite server. This resource was ported from the redhat_subscription_manager community cookbook.

rhsm_repo

Use the rhsm_repo resource to enable or disable Red Hat Subscription Manager repositories that are made available via attached subscriptions. This resource was ported from the redhat_subscription_manager community cookbook.

rhsm_subscription

Use the rhsm_subscription resource to add or remove Red Hat Subscription Manager subscriptions for your host. This can be used when a host's activation_key does not attach all necessary subscriptions to your host. This resource was ported from the redhat_subscription_manager community cookbook.

sudo

Use the sudo resource to add or remove individual sudo entries using sudoers.d files. Sudo version 1.7.2 or newer is required to use the sudo resource, as it relies on the #includedir directive introduced in version 1.7.2. This resource does not enforce installation of the required sudo version. Supported releases of Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, and RHEL (6+) all support this feature. This resource was ported from the sudo community cookbook.

swap_file

Use the swap_file resource to create or delete swap files on Linux systems, and optionally to manage the swappiness configuration for a host. This resource was ported from the swap community cookbook.

sysctl

Use the sysctl resource to set kernel parameters using the sysctl command line tool and configuration files in the system's sysctl.d directory. Configuration files managed by this resource are named 99-chef-KEYNAME.conf. If an existing value was already set for the value it will be backed up to the node and restored if the :remove action is used later. This resource was ported from the sysctl community cookbook.

Note: This resource no longer backs up existing key values to the node when changing values as we have done in the sysctl cookbook previously. The resource has also been renamed from sysctl_param to sysctl with backwards compatibility for the previous name.

windows_ad_join

Use the windows_ad_join resource to join a Windows Active Directory domain and reboot the node. This resource is based on the win_ad_client resource in the win_ad community cookbook, but is not backwards compatible with that resource.

windows_auto_run

Use the windows_auto_run resource to set applications to run at logon. This resource was ported from the windows community cookbook.

windows_feature

Use the windows_feature resource to add, remove or delete Windows features and roles. This resource calls the windows_feature_dism or windows_feature_powershell resources depending on the specified installation method and defaults to dism, which is available on both Workstation and Server editions of Windows. This resource was ported from the windows community cookbook.

Note: These resources received significant refactoring in the 4.0 version of the windows cookbook (March 2018). windows_feature resources now fail if the installation of invalid features is requested and support for installation via server servermanagercmd.exe has been removed. If you are using a windows cookbook version less than 4.0 you may need to update cookbooks for Chef 14.

windows_font

Use the windows_font resource to install or remove font files on Windows. By default, the font is sourced from the cookbook using the resource, but a URI source can be specified as well. This resource was ported from the windows community cookbook.

windows_printer

Use the windows_printer resource to setup Windows printers. Note that this doesn't currently install a printer driver. You must already have the driver installed on the system. This resource was ported from the windows community cookbook.

windows_printer_port

Use the windows_printer_port resource to create and delete TCP/IPv4 printer ports on Windows. This resource was ported from the windows community cookbook.

windows_shortcut

Use the windows_shortcut resource to create shortcut files on Windows. This resource was ported from the windows community cookbook.

Custom Resource Improvements

We've expanded the DSL for custom resources with new functionality to better document your resources and help users with errors and upgrades. Many resources in Chef itself are now using this new functionality, and you'll see more updated to take advantage of this it in the future.

Deprecations in Cookbook Resources

Chef 14 provides new primitives that allow you to deprecate resources or properties with the same functionality used for deprecations in Chef Client resources. This allows you make breaking changes to enterprise or community cookbooks with friendly notifications to downstream cookbook consumers directly in the Chef run.

Deprecate the foo_bar resource in a cookbook:

deprecated "The foo_bar resource has been deprecated and will be removed in the next major release of this cookbook scheduled for 12/25/2018!"

property :thing, String, name_property: true

action :create do
 # you'd probably have some actual chef code here
end

Deprecate the thing2 property in a resource

property :thing2, String, deprecated: 'The thing2 property has been deprecated and will be removed in the next major release of this cookbook scheduled for 12/25/2018!'

Rename a property with a deprecation warning for users of the old property name

deprecated_property_alias 'thing2', 'the_second_thing', 'The thing2 property was renamed the_second_thing in the 2.0 release of this cookbook. Please update your cookbooks to use the new property name.'

Platform Deprecations

chef-client no longer is built or tested on OS X 10.10 in accordance with Chef's EOL policy.

validation_message

Validation messages allow you give the user a friendly error message when any validation on a property fails.

Provide a friendly message when a regex fails:

property :repo_name, String, regex: [/^[^\/]+$/], validation_message: "The repo_name property cannot contain a forward slash '/'",

Resource Documentation

You can now include documentation that describes how a resource is to be used. Expect this data to be consumed by Chef and other tooling in future releases.

A resource which includes description and introduced values in the resource, actions, and properties:

description 'The apparmor_policy resource is used to add or remove policy files from a cookbook file'
introduced '14.1'

property :source_cookbook, String,
         description: 'The cookbook to source the policy file from'
property :source_filename, String,
         description: 'The name of the source file if it differs from the apparmor.d file being created'

action :add do
  description 'Adds an apparmor policy'

  # you'd probably have some actual chef code here
end

Improved Resources

Many existing resources now include new actions and properties that expand their functionality.

apt_package

apt_package includes a new overwrite_config_files property. Setting this new property to true is equivalent to passing -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" to apt, and allows you to install packages that prompt the user to overwrite config files. Thanks @ccope for this new property.

env

The env resource has been renamed to windows_env as it only supports the Windows platform. Existing cookbooks using env will continue to function, but should be updated to use the new name.

ifconfig

ifconfig includes a new family property for setting the network family on Debian systems. Thanks @martinisoft for this new property.

registry_key

The sensitive property can now be used in registry_key to suppress the output of the key's data from logs and error messages. Thanks @shoekstra for implementing this.

powershell_package

powershell_package includes a new source property to allow specifying the source of the package. Thanks @Happycoil for this new property.

systemd_unit

systemd_unit includes the following new actions:

  • preset - Restore the preset enable/disable configuration for a unit
  • revert - Revert to a vendor's version of a unit file
  • reenable - Reenable a unit file

Thanks @nathwill for these new actions.

windows_service

windows_service now includes actions for fully managing services on Windows, in addition to the previous actions for starting/stopping/enabling services.

  • create - Create a new service
  • delete - Delete an existing service
  • configure - Reconfigure an existing service

Thanks @jasonwbarnett for these new actions

route

route includes a new comment property.

Thanks Thomas Doherty for adding this new property.

Expanded Configuration Detection

Ohai has been expanded to collect more information than ever. This should make writing cross-platform and cross cloud cookbooks simpler.

Windows Kernel information

The kernel plugin now reports the following information on Windows:

  • node['kernel']['product_type'] - Workstation vs. Server editions of Windows
  • node['kernel']['system_type'] - What kind of hardware are we installed on (Desktop, Mobile, Workstation, Enterprise Server, etc.)
  • node['kernel']['server_core'] - Are we on Windows Server Core edition?

Cloud Detection

Ohai now detects the Scaleway cloud and provides additional configuration information for systems running on Azure.

Virtualization / Container Detection

In addition to detecting if a system is a Docker host, we now provide a large amount of Docker configuration information available at node['docker']. This includes the release of Docker, installed plugins, network config, and the number of running containers.

Ohai also now properly detects LXD containers and macOS guests running on VirtualBox / VMware. This data is available in node['virtualization']['systems'].

Optional Ohai Plugins

Ohai now includes the ability to mark plugins as optional, which skips those plugins by default. This allows us to ship additional plugins, which some users may find useful, but not all users want that data collected in the node object on a Chef server. The change introduces two new configuration options; run_all_plugins which runs everything including optional plugins, and optional_plugins which allows you to run plugins marked as optional.

By default we will now be marking the lspci, sessions shard and passwd plugins as optional. Passwd has been particularly problematic for nodes attached to LDAP or AD where it attempts to write the entire directory's contents to the node. If you previously disabled this plugin via Ohai config, you no longer need to. Hurray!

Other Changes

Ruby 2.5

Ruby has been updated to version 2.5 bringing a 10% performance improvement and improved functionality.

InSpec 2.0

InSpec has been updated to the 2.0 release. InSpec 2.0 brings compliance automation to the cloud, with new resource types specifically built for AWS and Azure clouds. Along with these changes are major speed improvements and quality of life updates. Please visit https://www.inspec.io/ for more information.

Policyfile Hoisting

Many users of Policyfiles rely on "hoisting" to provide group specific attributes. This approach was formalized in the poise-hoist extension, and is now included in Chef 14.

To hoist an attribute, the user provides a default attribute structure in their Policyfile similar to:

default['staging']['myapp']['title'] = "My Staging App" default['production']['myapp']['title'] = "My App"

and then accesses the node attribute in their cookbook as:

node['myapp']['title']

The correct attribute is then provided based on the policy_group of the node, so with a policy_group of staging the attribute would contain "My Staging App".

yum_package rewrite

yum_package received a ground up rewrite that greatly improves both the performance and functionality while also resolving a dozen existing issues. It introduces a new caching method that runs for the duration of the chef-client process. This caching method speeds up each package install and takes 1/2 the memory of the previous yum-dump.py process.

yum_package should now take any argument that yum install does and operate the same way, including version constraints "foo < 1.2.3" and globs "foo-1.2*" along with arches "foo.i386" and in combinations

Package with a version constraint:

yum_package "foo < 1.2.3"

Installing a package via what it provides:

yum_package "perl(Git)"

powershell_exec Mixin

Since our supported Windows platforms can all run .NET Framework 4.0 and PowerShell 4.0 we have taken time to add a new helper that will allow for faster and safer interactions with the system PowerShell. You will be able to use the powershell_exec mixin in most places where you would have previously used powershell_out. For comparison, a basic benchmark test to return the $PSVersionTable 100 times completed 7.3X faster compared to the powershell_out method. The majority of the time difference is because of less time spent in invocation. So we believe it has big future potential where multiple calls to PowerShell are required inside (for example) a custom resource. Many core Chef resources will be updated to use this new mixin in future releases.

Logging Improvements

Chef now includes a new log level of :trace in addition to the existing :info, :warn, and :debug levels. With the introduction of trace level logging we've moved a large amount of logging that is more useful for Chef developers from debug to trace. This makes it easier for Chef Cookbook developers to use debug level to get useful information.

Security Updates

OpenSSL

OpenSSL has been updated to 1.0.2o to resolve CVE-2018-0739

Ruby

Ruby has been updated to 2.5.1 to resolve the following vulnerabilities:

Breaking Changes

This release completes the deprecation process for many of the deprecations that were warnings throughout the Chef 12 and Chef 13 releases.

erl_call Resource

The erl_call resource was deprecated in Chef 13.7 and has been removed.

deploy Resource

The deploy resource was deprecated in Chef 13.6 and been removed. If you still require this resource, it is available in the new deploy_resource cookbook at https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/deploy_resource

Windows 2003 Support

Support for Windows 2003 has been removed from both Chef and Ohai, improving the performance of Chef on Windows hosts.

knife deprecations

  • knife bootstrap options --distro and --template_file flags were deprecated in Chef 12 and have now been removed.
  • knife help functionality that read legacy Chef manpages has been removed as the manpages had not been updated and were often quite wrong. Running knife help will now simply show the help menu.
  • knife index rebuild has been removed as reindexing Chef Server was only necessary on releases prior to Chef Server 11.
  • The knife ssh --identity-file flag was deprecated and has been removed. Users should use the --ssh_identity_file flag instead.
  • knife ssh csshx was deprecated in Chef 10 and has been removed. Users should use knife ssh cssh instead.

Chef Solo -r flag

The Chef Solor -r flag has been removed as it was deprecated and replaced with the --recipe-url flag in Chef 12.

node.set and node.set_unless attribute levels removal

node.set and node.set_unless were deprecated in Chef 12 and have been removed in Chef 14. To replicate this same functionality users should use node.normal and node.normal_unless, although we highly recommend reading our attribute documentation to make sure normal is in fact the your desired attribute level.

chocolatey_package :uninstall Action

The chocolatey_package resource in the chocolatey cookbook supported an :uninstall action. When this resource was moved into the Chef Client we allowed this action with a deprecation warning. This action is now removed.

Property names not using new_resource.NAME

Previously if a user wrote a custom resource with a property named foo they could reference it throughout the resource using the name foo. This caused multiple edge cases where the property name could conflict with resources or methods in Chef. Properties now must be referenced as new_resource.foo. This was already the case when writing LWRPs.

epic_fail

The original name for the ignore_failure property in resource was epic_fail. The legacy name has been removed.

Legacy Mixins

Several legacy mixins mostly used in older HWRPs have been removed. Usage of these mixins has resulted in deprecation warnings for several years and they are rarely used in cookbooks available on the Supermarket.

  • Chef::Mixin::LanguageIncludeAttribute
  • Chef::Mixin::RecipeDefinitionDSLCore
  • Chef::Mixin::LanguageIncludeRecipe
  • Chef::Mixin::Language
  • Chef::DSL::Recipe::FullDSL

cloud_v2 and filesystem2 Ohai Plugins

In Chef 13 the cloud_v2 plugin replaced data at node['cloud'] and filesystem2 replaced data at node['filesystem']. For compatibility with cookbooks that were previously using the "v2" data we continued to write data to both locations (ie: both node['filesystem'] and node['filesystem2']). We now no longer write data to the "v2" locations which greatly reduces the amount of data we need to store on the Chef server.

Ipscopes Ohai Plugin Removed

The ipscopes plugin has been removed as it duplicated data already present in the network plugins and required the user to install an additional gem into the Chef installation.

Ohai libvirt attributes moved

The libvirt Ohai plugin now writes data to node['libvirt'] instead of writing to various locations in node['virtualization']. This plugin required installing an additional gem into the Chef installation and thus was infrequently used.

Ohai Plugin V6 Support Removed

In 2014 we introduced Ohai v7 with a greatly improved plugin format. With Chef 14 we no longer support loading of the legacy "v6" plugin format.

Newly-disabled Ohai Plugins

As mentioned above we now support an optional flag for Ohai plugins and have marked the sessions, lspci, and passwd plugins as optional, which disables them by default. If you need one of these plugins you can include them using optional_plugins.

optional_plugins in the client.rb file:

optional_plugins [ "lspci", "passwd" ]

Chef Client Release Notes 13.8:

Revert attributes changes from 13.7

Per https://discourse.chef.io/t/regression-in-chef-client-13-7-16/12518/1 , there was a regression in how arrays and hashes were handled in 13.7. In 13.8, we've reverted to the same code as 13.6.

Continuing work on windows_task

13.8 has better validation for the idle_time property, when using the on_idle frequency.

Security Updates

  • Updated libxml2 to 2.9.7; fixes: CVE-2017-15412

Chef Client Release Notes 13.7:

The windows_task Resource should be better behaved

We've spent a considerable amount of time testing and fixing the windows_task resource to ensure that it is properly idempotent and correct in more situations.

Credentials handling

Previously, chef on the workstation used knife.rb or config.rb to handle credentials. This didn't do a great job when interacting with multiple Chef servers, leading to the need for tools like knife_block. We've added support for a credentials file that can contain configuration for many Chef servers (or organizations), and we've made it easy to indicate which account you mean to use.

New deprecations

erl_call Resource

We introduced erl_call to help us to manage CouchDB servers back in the olden times of Chef. Since then, we've noticed that no-one uses it, and so erl_call will be removed in Chef 14. Foodcritic rule FC105 has been introduced to detect usage of erl_call.

epic_fail

The original name for the ignore_failure property in resources was epic_fail. Our documentation hasn't referred to epic_fail for years and out of the 3500 cookbooks on the Supermarket only one uses epic_fail. In Chef 14 we will remove the epic_fail property entirely. Foodcritic rule FC107 has been introduced to detect usage of epic_fail.

Legacy Mixins

In Chef 14 several legacy legacy mixins will be removed. Usage of these mixins has resulted in deprecation warnings for several years. They were traditionally used in some HWRPs, but are rarely found in code available on the Supermarket. Foodcritic rules FC097, FC098, FC099, FC100, and FC102 have been introduced to detect these mixins.

  • Chef::Mixin::LanguageIncludeAttribute
  • Chef::Mixin::RecipeDefinitionDSLCore
  • Chef::Mixin::LanguageIncludeRecipe
  • Chef::Mixin::Language
  • Chef::DSL::Recipe::FullDSL

:uninstall action in chocolatey_package

The chocolatey cookbook's chocolatey_package resource originally contained an :uninstall action. When chocolatey_package was moved into core Chef we made :uninstall an alias for :remove. In Chef 14 :uninstall will no longer be a valid action. Foodcritic rule FC103 has been introduced to detect the usage of the :uninstall action.

Bugfixes

  • Resolved a bug where knife commands that prompted on Windows would never display the prompt
  • Fixed hiding of sensitive resources when converge_if_changed was used
  • Fixed scenarios where services would fail to start on Solaris

Security Updates

  • OpenSSL has been upgraded to 1.0.2n to resolve CVE-2017-3738, CVE-2017-3737, CVE-2017-3736, and CVE-2017-3735.
  • Ruby has been upgraded to 2.4.3 to resolve CVE-2017-17405

Ohai 13.7 Release Notes:

Network Tunnel Information

The Network plugin on Linux hosts now gathers additional information on tunnels

LsPci Plugin

The new LsPci plugin provides a node[:pci] hash with information about the PCI bus based on lspci. Only runs on Linux.

EC2 C5 Detection

The EC2 plugin has been updated to properly detect the new AWS hypervisor used in the C5 instance types

mdadm

The mdadm plugin has been updated to properly handle arrays with more than 10 disks and to properly handle journal and spare drives in the disk counts

Chef Client Release Notes 13.6.4:

Bugfixes

  • Resolved a regression in 13.6.0 that prevented upgrading packages on Debian/Ubuntu when the package name contained a tilde.

Security Updates

  • OpenSSL has been upgraded to 1.0.2m to resolve CVE-2017-3735 and CVE-2017-3736
  • RubyGems has been upgraded to 2.6.14 to resolve CVE-2017-0903

Chef Client Release Notes 13.6:

deploy Resource Is Deprecated

The deploy resource (and its alter ego deploy_revision) have been deprecated, to be removed in Chef 14. This is being done because this resource is considered overcomplicated and error-prone in the modern Chef ecosystem. A compatibility cookbook will be available to help users migrate during the Chef 14 release cycle. See the deprecation documentation for more information.

zypper_package supports package downgrades

zypper_package now supports downgrading installed packages with the allow_downgrade property.

InSpec updated to 1.42.3

Reserve certain Data Bag names

It's no longer possible to create data bags named node, role, client, or environment. Existing data bags will continue to work as before.

Properly use yum on RHEL 7

If both dnf and yum were installed, in some circumstances the yum provider might choose to run dnf, which is not what we intended it to do. It now properly runs yum, all the time.

Ohai 13.6 Release Notes:

Critical Plugins

Users can now specify a list of plugins which are critical. Critical plugins will cause Ohai to fail if they do not run successfully (and thus cause a Chef run using Ohai to fail). The syntax for this is:

ohai.critical_plugins << :Filesystem

Filesystem now has a allow_partial_data configuration option

The Filesystem plugin now has a allow_partial_data configuration option. If set, the filesystem will return whatever data it can even if some commands it ran failed.

Rackspace detection on Windows

Windows nodes running on Rackspace will now properly detect themselves as running on Rackspace without a hint file.

Package data on Amazon Linux

The Packages plugin now supports gathering packages data on Amazon Linux

Deprecation updates

In Ohai 13 we replaced the filesystem and cloud plugins with the filesystem2 and cloud_v2 plugins. To maintain compatibility with users of the previous V2 plugins we write data to both locations. We had originally planned to continue writing data to both locations until Chef 15. Instead due to the large amount of duplicate node data this introduces we are updating OHAI-11 and OHAI-12 deprecations to remove node['cloud_v2'] and node['filesystem2'] with the release of Chef 14 in April 2018.

Chef Client Release Notes 13.5:

Mount's password property is now marked as sensitive

This means that passwords passed to mount won't show up in logs.

The windows_task resource now correctly handles start_day

Previously, the resource would accept any date that was formatted correctly in the local locale, unlike the Windows cookbook and Windows itself. We now only support the MM/DD/YYYY format, in common with the Windows cookbook.

InSpec updated to 1.39.1

Ohai 13.5 Release Notes:

Correctly detect IPv6 routes ending in ::

Previously we would ignore routes that ended ::, and now we properly detect them.

Plugin run time is now measured

Debug logs will show the length of time each plugin takes to run, making debugging of long ohai runs easier.

Chef Client Release Notes 13.4:

Security release of Ruby

Chef Client 13.4 includes Ruby 2.4.2 to fix the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2017-0898
  • CVE-2017-10784
  • CVE-2017-14033
  • CVE-2017-14064

Security release of RubyGems

Chef Client 13.4 includes RubyGems 2.6.13 to fix the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2017-0899
  • CVE-2017-0900
  • CVE-2017-0901
  • CVE-2017-0902

Ifconfig provider on Red Hat now supports additional properties

It is now possible to set ETHTOOL_OPTS, BONDING_OPTS, MASTER and SLAVE properties on interfaces on Red Hat compatible systems. See https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/s1-networkscripts-interfaces.html for further information

Properties

  • ethtool_opts
    Ruby types: String
    Platforms: Fedora, RHEL, Amazon Linux A string containing arguments to ethtool. The string will be wrapped in double quotes, so ensure that any needed quotes in the property are surrounded by single quotes

  • bonding_opts
    Ruby types: String
    Platforms: Fedora, RHEL, Amazon Linux A string containing configuration parameters for the bonding device.

  • master
    Ruby types: String
    Platforms: Fedora, RHEL, Amazon Linux The channel bonding interface that this interface is linked to.

  • slave
    Ruby types: String
    Platforms: Fedora, RHEL, Amazon Linux Whether the interface is controlled by the channel bonding interface defined by master, above.

Chef Vault is now included

Chef Client 13.4 now includes the chef-vault gem, making it easier for users of chef-vault to use their encrypted items.

Windows remote_file resource with alternate credentials

The remote_file resource now supports the use of credentials on Windows when accessing a remote UNC path on Windows such as \\myserver\myshare\mydirectory\myfile.txt. This allows access to the file at that path location even if the Chef client process identity does not have permission to access the file. The new properties remote_user, remote_domain, and remote_password may be used to specify credentials with access to the remote file so that it may be read.

Note: This feature is mainly used for accessing files between two nodes in different domains and having different user accounts. In case the two nodes are in same domain, remote_file resource does not need remote_user and remote_password specified because the user has the same access on both systems through the domain.

Properties

The following properties are new for the remote_file resource:

  • remote_user
    Ruby types: String
    Windows only: The user name of a user with access to the remote file specified by the source property. Default value: nil. The user name may optionally be specifed with a domain, i.e. domain\user or [email protected] via Universal Principal Name (UPN) format. It can also be specified without a domain simply as user if the domain is instead specified using the remote_domain attribute. Note that this property is ignored if source is not a UNC path. If this property is specified, the remote_password property must be specified.

  • remote_password
    Ruby types String
    Windows only: The password of the user specified by the remote_user property. Default value: nil. This property is mandatory if remote_user is specified and may only be specified if remote_user is specified. The sensitive property for this resource will automatically be set to true if remote_password is specified.

  • remote_domain
    Ruby types String
    Windows only: The domain of the user user specified by the remote_user property. Default value: nil. If not specified, the user and password properties specified by the remote_user and remote_password properties will be used to authenticate that user against the domain in which the system hosting the UNC path specified via source is joined, or if that system is not joined to a domain it will authenticate the user as a local account on that system. An alternative way to specify the domain is to leave this property unspecified and specify the domain as part of the remote_user property.

Examples

Accessing file from a (different) domain account

remote_file "E://domain_test.txt"  do
  source  "\\\\myserver\\myshare\\mydirectory\\myfile.txt"
  remote_domain "domain"
  remote_user "username"
  remote_password "password"
end

OR

remote_file "E://domain_test.txt"  do
  source  "\\\\myserver\\myshare\\mydirectory\\myfile.txt"
  remote_user "domain\\username"
  remote_password "password"
end

Accessing file using a local account on the remote machine

remote_file "E://domain_test.txt"  do
  source  "\\\\myserver\\myshare\\mydirectory\\myfile.txt"
  remote_domain "."
  remote_user "username"
  remote_password "password"
end

OR

remote_file "E://domain_test.txt"  do
  source  "\\\\myserver\\myshare\\mydirectory\\myfile.txt"
  remote_user ".\\username"
  remote_password "password"
end

windows_path resource

windows_path resource has been moved to core chef from windows cookbook. Use the windows_path resource to manage the path environment variable on Microsoft Windows.

Actions

  • :add - Add an item to the system path
  • :remove - Remove an item from the system path

Properties

  • path - Name attribute. The name of the value to add to the system path

Examples

Add Sysinternals to the system path

windows_path 'C:\Sysinternals' do
  action :add
end

Remove 7-Zip from the system path

windows_path 'C:\7-Zip' do
  action :remove
end

Ohai Release Notes 13.4

Windows EC2 Detection

Detection of nodes running in EC2 has been greatly improved and should now detect nodes 100% of the time including nodes that have been migrated to EC2 or were built with custom AMIs.

Azure Metadata Endpoint Detection

Ohai now polls the new Azure metadata endpoint, giving us additional configuration details on nodes running in Azure

Sample data now available under azure:

{
  "metadata": {
    "compute": {
      "location": "westus",
      "name": "timtest",
      "offer": "UbuntuServer",
      "osType": "Linux",
      "platformFaultDomain": "0",
      "platformUpdateDomain": "0",
      "publisher": "Canonical",
      "sku": "17.04",
      "version": "17.04.201706191",
      "vmId": "8d523242-71cf-4dff-94c3-1bf660878743",
      "vmSize": "Standard_DS1_v2"
    },
    "network": {
      "interfaces": {
        "000D3A33AF03": {
          "mac": "000D3A33AF03",
          "public_ipv6": [

          ],
          "public_ipv4": [
            "52.160.95.99",
            "23.99.10.211"
          ],
          "local_ipv6": [

          ],
          "local_ipv4": [
            "10.0.1.5",
            "10.0.1.4",
            "10.0.1.7"
          ]
        }
      },
      "public_ipv4": [
        "52.160.95.99",
        "23.99.10.211"
      ],
      "local_ipv4": [
        "10.0.1.5",
        "10.0.1.4",
        "10.0.1.7"
      ],
      "public_ipv6": [

      ],
      "local_ipv6": [

      ]
    }
  }
}

Package Plugin Supports Arch Linux

The Package plugin has been updated to include package information on Arch Linux systems.

Chef Client Release Notes 13.3:

Unprivileged Symlink Creation on Windows

Chef can now create symlinks without privilege escalation, which allows for the creation of symlinks on Windows 10 Creator Update.

nokogiri Gem

The nokogiri gem is once again bundled with the omnibus install of Chef

zypper_package Options

It is now possible to pass additional options to the zypper in the zypper_package resource. This can be used to pass any zypper CLI option

Example:

zypper_package 'foo' do
  options '--user-provided'
end

windows_task Improvements

The windows_task resource now properly allows updating the configuration of a scheduled task when using the :create action. Additionally the previous :change action from the windows cookbook has been aliased to :create to provide backwards compatibility.

apt_preference Resource

The apt_preference resource has been ported from the apt cookbook. This resource allows for the creation of APT preference files controlling which packages take priority during installation.

Further information regarding apt-pinning is available via https://wiki.debian.org/AptPreferences and https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/apt/apt_preferences.5.en.html

Actions

  • :add: creates a preferences file under /etc/apt/preferences.d
  • :remove: Removes the file, therefore unpin the package

Properties

  • package_name: name attribute. The name of the package
  • glob: Pin by glob() expression or regexp surrounded by /.
  • pin: The package version/repository to pin
  • pin_priority: The pinning priority aka "the highest package version wins"

Examples

Pin libmysqlclient16 to version 5.1.49-3:

apt_preference 'libmysqlclient16' do
  pin          'version 5.1.49-3'
  pin_priority '700'
end

Unpin libmysqlclient16:

apt_preference 'libmysqlclient16' do
  action :remove
end

Pin all packages from dotdeb.org:

apt_preference 'dotdeb' do
  glob         '*'
  pin          'origin packages.dotdeb.org'
  pin_priority '700'
end

zypper_repository Resource

The zypper_repository resource allows for the creation of Zypper package repositories on SUSE Enterprise Linux and openSUSE systems. This resource maintains full compatibility with the resource in the existing zypper cookbooks

Actions

  • :add - adds a repo
  • :delete - removes a repo

Properties

  • repo_name - repository name if different from the resource name (name property)
  • type - the repository type. default: 'NONE'
  • description - the description of the repo that will be shown in zypper repos
  • baseurl - the base url of the repo
  • path - the relative path from the baseurl
  • mirrorlist - the url to the mirrorlist to use
  • gpgcheck - should we gpg check the repo (true/false). default: true
  • gpgkey - location of repo key to import
  • priority - priority of the repo. default: 99
  • autorefresh - should the repository be automatically refreshed (true/false). default: true
  • keeppackages - should packages be saved (true/false). default: false
  • refresh_cache - should package cache be refreshed (true/false). default: true
  • enabled - should this repository be enabled (true/false). default: true
  • mode - the file mode of the repository file. default: "0644"

Examples

Add the Apache repository for openSUSE Leap 42.2

zypper_repository 'apache' do
  baseurl 'http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Apache'
  path '/openSUSE_Leap_42.2'
  type 'rpm-md'
  priority '100'
end

Ohai Release Notes 13.3:

Additional Platform Support

Ohai now properly detects the F5 Big-IP platform and platform_version.

  • platform: bigip
  • platform_family: rhel

Chef Client Release Notes 13.2:

Properly send policyfile data

When sending events back to the Chef Server, we now correctly expand the run_list for nodes that use Policyfiles. This allows Automate to correctly report the node.

Reconfigure between runs when daemonized

When Chef performs a reconfigure, it re-reads the configuration files. It also re-opens its log files, which facilitates log file rotation.

Chef normally will reconfigure when sent a HUP signal. As of this release if you send a HUP signal while it is converging, the reconfigure happens at the end of the run. This is avoids potential Ruby issues when the configuration file contains additional Ruby code that is executed. While the daemon is sleeping between runs, sending a SIGHUP will still cause an immediate reconfigure.

Additionally, Chef now always performs a reconfigure after every run when daemonized.

New Deprecations

Explicit property methods

https://docs.chef.io/deprecations_namespace_collisions.html

In Chef 14, custom resources will no longer assume property methods are being called on new_resource, and instead require the resource author to be explicit.

Ohai Release Notes 13.2:

Ohai 13.2 has been a fantastic release in terms of community involvement with new plugins, platform support, and critical bug fixes coming from community members. A huge thank you to msgarbossa, albertomurillo, jaymzh, and davide125 for their work.

New Features

Systemd Paths Plugin

A new plugin has been added to expose system and user paths from systemd-path (see https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-path.html for details).

Linux Network, Filesystem, and Mdadm Plugin Resilience

The Network, Filesystem, and Mdadm plugins have been improved to greatly reduce failures to collect data. The Network plugin now better finds the binaries it requires for shelling out, filesystem plugin utilizes data from multiple sources, and mdadm handles arrays in bad states.

Zpool Plugin Platform Expansion

The Zpool plugin has been updated to support BSD and Linux in addition to Solaris.

RPM version parsing on AIX

The packages plugin now correctly parses RPM package name / version information on AIX systems.

Additional Platform Support

Ohai now properly detects the Clear and ClearOS Linux distributions.

Clear Linux

  • platform: clearlinux
  • platform_family: clearlinux

ClearOS

  • platform: clearos
  • platform_family: rhel

New Deprecations

Removal of IpScopes plugin. (OHAI-13)

https://docs.chef.io/deprecations_ohai_ipscopes.html

In Chef/Ohai 14 (April 2018) we will remove the IpScopes plugin. The data returned by this plugin is nearly identical to information already returned by individual network plugins and this plugin required the installation of an additional gem into the Chef installation. We believe that few users were installing the gem and users would be better served by the data returned from the network plugins.

13.1

Socketless local mode by default

For security reasons we are switching Local Mode to use socketless connections by default. This prevents potential attacks where an unprivileged user or process connects to the internal Zero server for the converge and changes data.

If you use Chef Provisioning with Local Mode, you may need to pass --listen to chef-client.

New Deprecations

Removal of support for Ohai version 6 plugins (OHAI-10)

https://docs.chef.io/deprecations_ohai_v6_plugins.html

In Chef/Ohai 14 (April 2018) we will remove support for loading Ohai v6 plugins, which we deprecated in Ohai 7/Chef 11.12.

13.0

Rubygems provider sources behavior changed.

The behavior of gem_package and chef_gem is now to always apply the Chef::Config[:rubygems_url] sources, which may be a String uri or an Array of Strings. If additional sources are put on the resource with the source property those are added to the configured :rubygems_url sources.

This should enable easier setup of rubygems mirrors particularly in "airgapped" environments through the use of the global config variable. It also means that an admin may force all rubygems.org traffic to an internal mirror, while still being able to consume external cookbooks which have resources which add other mirrors unchanged (in a non-airgapped environment).

In the case where a resource must force the use of only the specified source(s), then the include_default_source property has been added -- setting it to false will remove the Chef::Config[:rubygems_url] setting from the list of sources for that resource.

The behavior of the clear_sources property is now to only add --clear-sources and has no magic side effects on the source options.

Ruby version upgraded to 2.4.1

We've upgraded to the latest stable release of the Ruby programming language. See the Ruby 2.4.0 Release Notes for an overview of what's new in the language.

Resource can now declare a default name

The core apt_update resource can now be declared without any name argument, no need for apt_update "this string doesn't matter but why do i have to type it?".

This can be used by any other resource by just overriding the name property and supplying a default:

  property :name, String, default: ""

Notifications to resources with empty strings as their name is also supported via either the bare resource name (apt_update -- matches what the user types in the DSL) or with empty brackets (apt_update[] -- matches the resource notification pattern).

The knife ssh command applies the same fuzzifier as knife search node

A bare name to knife search node will search for the name in tags, roles, fqdn, addresses, policy_name or policy_group fields and will match when given partial strings (available since Chef 11). The knife ssh search term has been similarly extended so that the search API matches in both cases. The node search fuzzifier has also been extracted out to a fuzz option to Chef::Search::Query for re-use elsewhere.

Cookbook root aliases

Rather than attributes/default.rb, cookbooks can now use attributes.rb in the root of the cookbook. Similarly for a single default recipe, cookbooks can use recipe.rb in the root of the cookbook.

knife ssh can now connect to gateways with ssh key authentication

The new gateway_identity_file option allows the operator to specify the key to access ssh gateways with.

Windows Task resource added

The windows_task resource has been ported from the windows cookbook, and many bugs have been fixed.

Solaris SMF services can now been started recursively

It is now possible to load Solaris services recursively, by ensuring the new options property of the service resource contains -r.

It's now possible to blacklist node attributes

This is the inverse of the pre-existing whitelisting functionality.

The guard interpreter for powershell_script is Powershell, again

When writing not_if or only_if statements, by default we now run those statements using powershell, rather than forcing the user to set guard_interpreter each time.

Zypper GPG checks by default

Zypper now defaults to performing gpg checks of packages.

The InSpec gem is now shipped by default

The inspec and train gems are shipped by default in the chef omnibus package, making it easier for users in airgapped environments to use InSpec.

Properly support managing Sys-V services on Debian systemd hosts

Chef now properly supports managing sys-v services on hosts running systemd. Previously Chef would incorrectly attempt to fallback to Upstart even if upstart was not installed.

Backwards Compatibility Breaks

Resource Cloning has been removed

When Chef compiles resources, it will no longer attempt to merge the properties of previously compiled resources with the same name and type in to the new resource. See the deprecation page for further information.

It is an error to specify both default and name_property on a property

Chef 12 made this work by picking the first option it found, but it was always an error and has now been disallowed.

The path property of the execute resource has been removed

It was never implemented in the provider, so it was always a no-op to use it, the remediation is to simply delete it.

Using the command property on any script resource (including bash, etc) is now a hard error

This was always a usage mistake. The command property was used internally by the script resource and was not intended to be exposed to users. Users should use the code property instead (or use the command property on an execute resource to execute a single command).

Omitting the code property on any script resource (including bash, etc) is now a hard error

It is possible that this was being used as a no-op resource, but the log resource is a better choice for that until we get a null resource added. Omitting the code property or mixing up the code property with the command property are also common usage mistakes that we need to catch and error on.

The chef_gem resource defaults to not run at compile time

The compile_time true flag may still be used to force compile time.

The Chef::Config[:chef_gem_compile_time] config option has been removed

In order to for community cookbooks to behave consistently across all users this optional flag has been removed.

The supports[:manage_home] and supports[:non_unique] API has been removed from all user providers

The remediation is to set the manage_home and non_unique properties directly.

Using relative paths in the creates property of an execute resource with specifying a cwd is now a hard error

Without a declared cwd the relative path was (most likely?) relative to wherever chef-client happened to be invoked which is not deterministic or easy to intuit behavior.

Chef::PolicyBuilder::ExpandNodeObject#load_node has been removed

This change is most likely to only affect internals of tooling like chefspec if it affects anything at all.

PolicyFile failback to create non-policyfile nodes on Chef Server < 12.3 has been removed

PolicyFile users on Chef-13 should be using Chef Server 12.3 or higher.

Cookbooks with self dependencies are no longer allowed

The remediation is removing the self-dependency depends line in the metadata.

Removed supports API from Chef::Resource

Retained only for the service resource (where it makes some sense) and for the mount resource.

Removed retrying of non-StandardError exceptions for Chef::Resource

Exceptions not decending from StandardError (e.g. LoadError, SecurityError, SystemExit) will no longer trigger a retry if they are raised during the executiong of a resources with a non-zero retries setting.

Removed deprecated method_missing access from the Chef::Node object

Previously, the syntax node.foo.bar could be used to mean node["foo"]["bar"], but this API had sharp edges where methods collided with the core ruby Object class (e.g. node.class) and where it collided with our own ability to extend the Chef::Node API. This method access has been deprecated for some time, and has been removed in Chef-13.

Changed declare_resource API

Dropped the create_if_missing parameter that was immediately supplanted by the edit_resource API (most likely nobody ever used this) and converted the created_at parameter from an optional positional parameter to a named parameter. These changes are unlikely to affect any cookbook code.

Node deep-duping fixes

The node.to_hash/node.to_h and node.dup APIs have been fixed so that they correctly deep-dup the node data structure including every string value. This results in a mutable copy of the immutable merged node structure. This is correct behavior, but is now more expensive and may break some poor code (which would have been buggy and difficult to follow code with odd side effects before).

For example:

node.default["foo"] = "fizz"
n = node.to_hash   # or node.dup
n["foo"] << "buzz"

before this would have mutated the original string in-place so that node["foo"] and node.default["foo"] would have changed to "fizzbuzz" while now they remain "fizz" and only the mutable n["foo"] copy is changed to "fizzbuzz".

Freezing immutable merged attributes

Since Chef 11 merged node attributes have been intended to be immutable but the merged strings have not been frozen. In Chef 13, in the process of merging the node attributes strings and other simple objects are dup'd and frozen. In order to get a mutable copy, you can now correctly use the node.dup or node.to_hash methods, or you should mutate the object correctly through its precedence level like node.default["some_string"] << "appending_this".

The Chef::REST API has been removed

It has been fully replaced with Chef::ServerAPI in chef-client code.

Properties overriding methods now raise an error

Defining a property that overrides methods defined on the base ruby Object or on Chef::Resource itself can cause large amounts of confusion. A simple example is property :hash which overrides the Object#hash method which will confuse ruby when the Custom Resource is placed into the Chef::ResourceCollection which uses a Hash internally which expects to call Object#hash to get a unique id for the object. Attempting to create property :action would also override the Chef::Resource#action method which is unlikely to end well for the user. Overriding inherited properties is still supported.

chef-shell now supports solo and legacy solo modes

Running chef-shell -s or chef-shell --solo will give you an experience consistent with chef-solo. chef-shell --solo-legacy-mode will give you an experience consistent with chef-solo --legacy-mode.

Chef::Platform.set and related methods have been removed

The deprecated code has been removed. All providers and resources should now be using Chef >= 12.0 provides syntax.

Remove sort option for the Search API

This option has been unimplemented on the server side for years, so any use of it has been pointless.

Remove Chef::ShellOut

This was deprecated and replaced a long time ago with mixlib-shellout and the shell_out mixin.

Remove method_missing from the Recipe DSL

The core of chef hasn't used this to implement the Recipe DSL since 12.5.1 and its unlikely that any external code depended upon it.

Simplify Recipe DSL wiring

Support for actions with spaces and hyphens in the action name has been dropped. Resources and property names with spaces and hyphens most likely never worked in Chef-12. UTF-8 characters have always been supported and still are.

easy_install resource has been removed

The Python easy_install package installer has been deprecated for many years, so we have removed support for it. No specific replacement for pip is being included with Chef at this time, but a pip-based python_package resource is available in the poise-python cookbooks.

Removal of run_command and popen4 APIs

All the APIs in chef/mixlib/command have been removed. They were deprecated by mixlib-shellout and the shell_out mixin API.

Iconv has been removed from the ruby libraries and chef omnibus build

The ruby Iconv library was replaced by the Encoding library in ruby 1.9.x and since the deprecation of ruby 1.8.7 there has been no need for the Iconv library but we have carried it forwards as a dependency since removing it might break some chef code out there which used this library. It has now been removed from the ruby build. This also removes LGPLv3 code from the omnibus build and reduces build headaches from porting iconv to every platform we ship chef-client on.

This will also affect nokogiri, but that gem natively supports UTF-8, UTF-16LE/BE, ISO-8851-1(Latin-1), ASCII and "HTML" encodings. Users who really need to write something like Shift-JIS inside of XML will need to either maintain their own nokogiri installs or will need to convert to using UTF-8.

Deprecated cookbook metadata has been removed

The recommends, suggests, conflicts, replaces and grouping metadata fields are no longer supported, and have been removed, since they were never used. Chef will ignore them in existing metadata.rb files, but we recommend that you remove them. This was proposed in RFC 85.

All unignored cookbook files will now be uploaded.

We now treat every file under a cookbook directory as belonging to a cookbook, unless that file is ignored with a chefignore file. This is a change from the previous behaviour where only files in certain directories, such as recipes or templates, were treated as special. This change allows chef to support new classes of files, such as Ohai plugins or Inspec tests, without having to make changes to the cookbook format to support them.

DSL-based custom resources and providers no longer get module constants

Up until now, creating a mycook/resources/thing.rb would create a Chef::Resources::MycookThing name to access the resource class object. This const is no longer created for resources and providers. You can access resource classes through the resolver API like:

Chef::Resource.resource_for_node(:mycook_thing, node)

Accessing a provider class is a bit more complex, as you need a resource against which to run a resolution like so:

Chef::ProviderResolver.new(node, find_resource!("mycook_thing[name]"), :nothing).resolve

Default values for resource properties are frozen

A resource declaring something like:

property :x, default: {}

will now see the default value set to be immutable. This prevents cases of modifying the default in one resource affecting others. If you want a per-resource mutable default value, define it inside a lazy{} helper like:

property :x, default: lazy { {} }

Resources which later modify their name during creation will have their name changed on the ResourceCollection and notifications

some_resource "name_one" do
  name "name_two"
end

The fix for sending notifications to multipackage resources involved changing the API which inserts resources into the resource collection slightly so that it no longer directly takes the string which is typed into the DSL but reads the (possibly coerced) name off of the resource after it is built. The end result is that the above resource will be named some_resource[name_two] instead of some_resource[name_one]. Note that setting the name (not the name_property, but actually renaming the resource) is very uncommon. The fix is to simply name the resource correctly in the first place (some_resource "name_two" do ...)

use_inline_resources is always enabled

The use_inline_resources provider mode is always enabled when using the action :name do ... end syntax. You can remove the use_inline_resources line.

knife cookbook site vendor has been removed

Please use knife cookbook site install instead.

knife cookbook create has been removed

Please use chef generate cookbook from the ChefDK instead.

Verify commands no longer support "%{file}"

Chef has always recommended %{path}, and %{file} has now been removed.

The partial_search recipe method has been removed

The partial_search method has been fully replaced by the filter_result argument to search, and has now been removed.

The logger and formatter settings are more predictable

The default now is the formatter. There is no more automatic switching to the logger when logging or when output is sent to a pipe. The logger needs to be specifically requested with --force-logger or it will not show up.

The --force-formatter option does still exist, although it will probably be deprecated in the future.

If your logfiles switch to the formatter, you need to include --force-logger for your daemonized runs.

Redirecting output to a file with chef-client > /tmp/chef.out now captures the same output as invoking it directly on the command line with no redirection.

Path Sanity disabled by default and modified

The chef client itself no long modifies its ENV['PATH'] variable directly. When using the shell_out API now, in addition to setting up LANG/LANGUAGE/LC_ALL variables that API will also inject certain system paths and the ruby bindir and gemdirs into the PATH (or Path on Windows). The shell_out_with_systems_locale API still does not mangle any environment variables. During the Chef-13 lifecycle changes will be made to prep Chef-14 to switch so that shell_out by default behaves like shell_out_with_systems_locale. A new flag will get introduced to call shell_out(..., internal: [true|false]) to either get the forced locale and path settings ("internal") or not. When that is introduced in Chef 13.x the default will be true (backwards-compat with 13.0) and that default will change in 14.0 to 'false'.

The PATH changes have also been tweaked so that the ruby bindir and gemdir PATHS are prepended instead of appended to the PATH. Some system directories are still appended.

Some examples of changes:

  • which ruby in 12.x will return any system ruby and fall back to the embedded ruby if using omnibus
  • which ruby in 13.x will return any system ruby and will not find the embedded ruby if using omnibus
  • shell_out_with_systems_locale("which ruby") behaves the same as which ruby above
  • shell_out("which ruby") in 12.x will return any system ruby and fall back to the embedded ruby if using omnibus
  • shell_out("which ruby") in 13.x will always return the omnibus ruby first (but will find the system ruby if not using omnibus)

The PATH in shell_out can also be overridden:

  • shell_out("which ruby", env: { "PATH" => nil }) - behaves like shell_out_with_systems_locale()
  • shell_out("which ruby", env: { "PATH" => [...include PATH string here...] }) - set it arbitrarily however you need

Since most providers which launch custom user commands use shell_out_with_systems_locale (service, execute, script, etc) the behavior will be that those commands that used to be having embedded omnibus paths injected into them no longer will. Generally this will fix more problems than it solves, but may causes issues for some use cases.

Default guard clauses (not_if/only_if) do not change the PATH or other env vars

The implementation switched to shell_out_with_systems_locale to match execute resource, etc.

Chef Client will now exit using the RFC062 defined exit codes

Chef Client will only exit with exit codes defined in RFC 062. This allows other tooling to respond to how a Chef run completes. Attempting to exit Chef Client with an unsupported exit code (either via Chef::Application.fatal! or Chef::Application.exit!) will result in an exit code of 1 (GENERIC_FAILURE) and a warning in the event log.

When Chef Client is running as a forked process on unix systems, the standardized exit codes are used by the child process. To actually have Chef Client return the standard exit code, client_fork false will need to be set in Chef Client's configuration file.