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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/ for the official Chef release notes.

Chef Infra Client 16.1

Ohai 16.1

Ohai 16.1 includes a new Selinux plugin which exposes node['selinux']['status'], node['selinux']['policy_booleans'], node['selinux']['process_contexts'], and node['selinux']['file_contexts']. Thanks @davide125 for this contribution. This new plugin is an optional plugin which is disabled by default. It can be enabled within your client.rb:

ohai.optional_plugins = [ :Selinux ]

Chef InSpec 4.18.114

InSpec has been updated from 4.18.111 to 4.18.114. This update adds new --reporter_message_truncation and --reporter_backtrace_inclusion reporter options to truncate messages and suppress backtraces.

Debian 10 aarch64

Chef Infra Client packages are now produced for Debian 10 on the aarch64 architecture. These packages are available at downloads.chef.io.

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved a regression in the launchd resource that prevented it from converging.
  • The :disable action in the launchd resource no longer fails if the plist was not found.
  • Several Ruby 2.7 deprecation warnings have been resolved.

Chef Infra Client 16.0.287

The Chef Infra Client 16.0.287 release includes important bug fixes for the Chef Infra Client 16 release:

  • Fixes the failure to install Windows packages on the 2nd convergence of the Chef Infra Client.
  • Resolves several failures in the launchd resource.
  • Removes an extra .java file on Windows installations that would cause a failure in the IIS 8.5 Server Security Technical Implementation Guide audit.
  • Updates the windows_printer resource so that the driver property will only be required when using the :create action.
  • Fixes the incorrectly spelled knife user invite recind command to be knife user invite rescind.
  • Update Chef InSpec to 4.8.111 with several minor improvements.

Chef Infra Client 16.0.275

The Chef Infra Client 16.0.275 release includes important regression fixes for the Chef Infra Client 16 release:

  • Resolved failures when using the windows_package resource. Thanks for reporting this issue @cookiecurse.
  • Resolved log warnings when running execute resources.
  • The appropriate cron or cron_d resource call is now called when using the :delete action in chef_client_cron. Thanks for reporting this issue jimwise.
  • The chef_client_cron resource now creates the log directory with 750 permissions not 640. Thanks for this fix DhaneshRaghavan.
  • The knife yaml convert command now correctly converts symbol values.
  • The sysctl, apt_preference, and cron_d remove actions no longer fail with missing property warnings.

Chef Infra Client 16.0

Breaking Changes

Log Resource Notification Behavior

The log resource in a recipe or resource will no longer trigger notifications by default. This allows authors to more liberally use log resources without impacting the updated resources count or impacting reporting to Chef Automate. This change will impact users that used the log resource to aggregate notifications from other resources, so they could limit the number of times a notification would fire. If you used the log resource to aggregate multiple notifications, you should convert to using the notify group resource, which was introduced in Chef Infra Client 15.8.

Example of notification aggregation with log resource:

template '/etc/foo' do
  source 'foo.erb'
  notifies :write, 'log[Aggregate notifications using a single log resource]', :immediately
end

template '/etc/bar' do
  source 'bar.erb'
  notifies :write, 'log[Aggregate notifications using a single log resource]', :immediately
end

log 'Aggregate notifications using a single log resource' do
  notifies :restart, 'service[foo]', :delayed
end

Example of notification aggregation with notify_group resource:

template '/etc/foo' do
  source 'foo.erb'
  notifies :run, 'notify_group[Aggregate notifications using a single notify_group resource]', :immediately
end

template '/etc/bar' do
  source 'bar.erb'
  notifies :run, 'notify_group[Aggregate notifications using a single notify_group resource]', :immediately
end

notify_group 'Aggregate notifications using a single notify_group resource' do
  notifies :restart, 'service[foo]', :delayed
end

The ChefDeprecations/LogResourceNotifications cop in Cookstyle 6.0 and later detects using the log resource for notifications in cookbooks.

To restore the previous behavior, set count_log_resource_updates true in your client.rb.

HWRP Style Resources Now Require resource_name / provides

Legacy HWRP-style resources, written as Ruby classes in the libraries directory of a cookbook, will now require either the use of resource_name or provides methods to define the resource names. Previously, Chef Infra Client would infer the desired resource name from the class, but this magic was problematic and has been removed.

The ChefDeprecations/ResourceWithoutNameOrProvides cop in Cookstyle 6.0 and later detects this deprecation.

build_essential GCC Updated on Solaris

On Solaris systems, we no longer constrain the version of GCC to 4.8.2 in the build_essential resource to allow for GCC 5 installations.

git Resource Branch Checkout Changes

The git resource no longer checks out to a new branch named deploy by default. Many users found this branching behavior confusing and unexpected so we've decided to implement a more predictable default. The resource will now default to either checking out the branch specified with the checkout_branch property or a detached HEAD state. If you'd like to revert to the previous behavior you can set the checkout_branch to deploy.

s390x Packaging

As outlined in our blog post at https://blog.chef.io/chef-infra-end-of-life-announcement-for-linux-client-on-ibm-s390x-architecture/, we will no longer be producing s390x platform packages for Chef Infra Client.

filesystem2 Node Data Replaces filesystem on FreeBSD / AIX / Solaris

In Chef Infra Client 14 we introduced a modernized filesystem layout of Ohai data on FreeBSD, AIX, and Solaris at node['fileystem2']. With the release of 16.0, we are now replacing the existing data at node['filesystem'] with this updated filesystem data. This data has a standardized format that matches Linux and macOS data to make it easier to write cross-platform cookbooks. In a future release of Chef Infra Client we'll remove the node['filesystem2'] as we complete this migration.

required: true on Properties Now Behaves As Expected

The behavior of required: true has been changed to better align with the expected behavior. Previously, if you set a property required: true on a custom resource property and did not explicitly reference the property in an action, then Chef Infra Client would not raise an exception. This meant many users would add their own validation to raise for resources they wanted to ensure they were always set. required: true will now properly raise if a property has not been set.

We have also expanded the required field for added flexibility in defining exactly which actions a property is required for. See Improved property require behavior below for more details.

Removal of Legacy metadata.rb depends Version Constraints

Support for the << and >> version constraints in metadata.rb has been removed. This was an undocumented feature from the Chef 0.10 era, which is not used in any cookbooks on the Supermarket. We are mentioning it since it is technically a breaking change, but it unlikely that this change will be impacting.

Examples:

depends 'windows', '<< 1.0'
depends 'windows', '>> 1.0'

Logging Improvements May Cause Behavior Changes

We've made low level changes to how logging behaves in Chef Infra Client that resolves many complaints we've heard of the years. With these change you'll now see the same logging output when you run chef-client on the command line as you will in logs from a daemonzed client run. This also corrects often confusing behavior where running chef-client on the command line would log to the console, but not to the log file location defined your client.rb. In that scenario you'll now see logs in your console and in your log file. We believe this is the expected behavior and will mean that your on-disk log files can always be the source of truth for changes that were made by Chef Infra Client. This may cause unexpected behavior changes for users that relied on using the command line flags to override the client.rb log location. If you have daemons running that log using the command line options you want to make sure that client.rb log location either matches or isn't defined.

Red Hat / CentOS 6 Systems Require C11 GCC for Some Gem Installations

The included release of Ruby in Chef Infra Client 16 now requires a C99 compliant compiler when using the chef_gem resource with gems that require compilation. Some systems, such as RHEL 6, do not ship with a C99 compiler and will fail if the gems they're attempting to install require compilation. If it is necessary to install compiled gems into the Chef Infra Client installation on one of these systems you can upgrade to a modern GCC release.

CentOS:

yum install centos-release-scl
yum install devtoolset-7
scl enable devtoolset-7 bash

Red Hat:

yum-config-manager --enable rhel-server-rhscl-7-rpms
yum install devtoolset-7
scl enable devtoolset-7 bash

Changes to Improve Gem Source behavior

We've improved the behavior for those that use custom rubygem sources, particularly those operating in air-gapped installations. These improvements involved changes to many of the default client.rb values and gem_package/chef_gem properties that require updating your usage of chef_gem and gem_package resources

The default value of the clear_sources property of gem_package and chef_gem resources has been changed to nil. The possible behaviors for clear_sources are now:

  • true: Always clear sources.
  • false: Never clear sources.
  • nil: Clear sources if source property is set, but don't clear sources otherwise.

The default value of the include_default_source property of gem_package and chef_gem resources has been changed to nil. The possible behaviors for include_default_source are now:

  • true: Always include the default source.
  • false: Never include the default source.
  • nil: Include the default source if rubygems_url client.rb value is set or if source and clear_sources are not set on the resource.

The default values of the rubygems_url client.rb config option has been changed to nil. Setting to nil previously had similar behavior to setting clear_sources to true, but with some differences. The new behavior is to always use https://rubygems.org as the default rubygems repo unless explicitly changed, and whether to use this value is determined by clear_sources and include_default_source.

Behavior Changes in Knife

knife status --long uses cloud attribute

The knife status --long resource now uses Ohai's cloud data instead of ec2 specific data. This improves, but changes, the data output for users on non-AWS clouds.

knife download role/environment format update

The knife download role and knife download environment commands now include all possible data fields including those without any data set. This new output behavior matches the behavior of other commands such as knife role show or knife environment show

Deprecated knife cookbook site command removed

The previously deprecated knife cookbook site commands have been removed. Use the knife supermarket commands instead.

Deprecated knife data bag create -s short option removed

The deprecated knife data bag create -s option that was not properly honored has been removed. Use the --secret option instead to set a data bag secret file during data bag creation.

sites-cookbooks directory no longer in cookbook_path

The legacy sites-cookbooks directory is no longer added to the default cookbook_path value. With this change, any users with a legacy sites-cookbooks directory will need to use the -O flag to override the cookbook directory when running commands such as knife cookbook upload.

If you have a repository that contains a site-cookbooks directory, we highly recommend using Policyfiles or Berkshelf to properly resolve these external cookbook dependencies without the need to copy them locally. Alternatively, you can move the contents of this folder into your main cookbook directory and they will continue to be seen by knife commands.

New Resources

alternatives

Use the alternatives resource to manage symbolic links to specify default command versions on Linux hosts. See the alternatives documentation for full usage information. Thanks @vkhatri for the original cookbook alternatives resource.

chef_client resources

We've added new resources to Chef Infra Client for setting the client to run on an interval using native system schedulers. We believe that these native schedulers provide a more flexible and reliable method for running the client than the traditional method of running as a full service. Using the native schedulers reduces hung clients and eases upgrades. This is the first of many steps towards removing the need for the chef-client cookbook and allowing Chef Infra Client to configure itself out of the box.

chef_client_cron

Use the chef_client_cron resource to setup the Chef Infra Client to run on a schedule using cron on Linux, Solaris, and AIX systems. See the chef_client_cron documentation for full usage information.

chef_client_systemd_timer

Use the chef_client_systemd_timer resource to setup the Chef Infra Client to run on a schedule using a systemd timer on systemd based Linux systems (RHEL 7+, Debian 8+, Ubuntu 16.04+ SLES 12+). See the chef_client_systemd_timer documentation for full usage information.

chef_client_scheduled_task

Use the chef_client_scheduled_task resource to setup the Chef Infra Client to run on a schedule using Windows Scheduled Tasks. See the chef_client_scheduled_task documentation for full usage information.

plist

Use the plist resource to generate plist files on macOS hosts. See the plist documentation for full usage information. Thanks Microsoft and @americanhanko for the original work on this resource in the macos cookbook.

user_ulimit

Use the user_ulimit resource to set per-user ulimit values on Linux systems. See the user_ulimit documentation for full usage information. Thanks @bmhatfield for the original work on this resource in the ulimit cookbook.

windows_security_policy

Use the windows_security_policy resource to modify location security policies on Windows hosts. See the windows_security_policy documentation for full usage information.

windows_user_privilege

Use the windows_user_privilege resource to add users and groups to the specified privileges on Windows hosts. See the windows_user_privilege documentation for full usage information.

Improved Resources

compile_time on all resources

The compile_time property is now available for all resources so that they can be set to run at compile time without the need forcing the action.

Set the compile_time property instead of forcing the resource to run at compile time:

  my_resource "foo" do
    action :nothing
  end.run_action(:run)

With the simpler compile_time property:

  my_resource "foo" do
    compile_time true
  end

build_essential

The build_essential resource includes a new :upgrade action for macOS systems that allows you to install updates to the Xcode Command Line Tools available via Software Update.

cron

The cron resource has been updated to use the same property validation for cron times that the cron_d resource uses. This improves failure messages when invalid inputs are set and also allows for jan-dec values to be used in the month property.

dnf_package

The dnf_package resource, which provides package under the hood on any system shipping with DNF, has been greatly refactored to resolve multiple issues. The version behavior and overall resource capabilities now match that of the yum_package resource.

  • The :lock action now works on RHEL 8.
  • Fixes to prevent attempting to install the same package during each Chef Infra Client run.
  • Resolved several idempotency issues.
  • Resolved an issue where installing a package with options '--enablerepo=foo' would fail.

git

The git resource now fully supports why-run mode and no longer checks out the deploy branch by default as mentioned in the breaking changes section.

locale

The locale resource now supports setting the system locale on Windows hosts.

msu_package resource improvements

The msu_package resource has been improved to work better with Microsoft's cumulative update packages. Newer releases of these cumulative update packages will not correctly install over the previous versions. We also extended the default timeout for installing MSU packages to 60 minutes. Thanks for reporting the timeout issue, @danielfloyd.

package

The package resource on macOS and Arch Linux systems now supports passing multiple packages into a single package resource via an array. This allows you to collapse multiple resources into a single resource for simpler cookbook authoring, which is significantly faster as it requires fewer calls to the packaging systems. Thanks for the Arch Linux support, @ingobecker!

Using multiple resources to install a package:

package 'git'
package 'curl'
package 'packer'

or

%w(git curl packer).each do |pkg|
  package pkg
end

can now be simplified to:

package %w(git curl packer)

service

The service resource has been updated to support newer releases of update-rc.d so that it properly disables sys-v init services on Debian Linux distributions. Thanks @robuye!

windows_firewall_rule

The windows_firewall_rule resource has been greatly improved thanks to work by @pschaumburg and @tecracer-theinen.

  • New icmp_type property, which allows setting the ICMP type when setting up ICMP protocol rules.
  • New displayname property, which allows defining the display name of the firewall rule.
  • New group property, which allows you to specify that only matching firewall rules of the indicated group association are copied.
  • The description property will now update if changed.
  • Fixed setting rules with multiple profiles.

windows_package

The windows_package resource now considers 3010 to be a valid exit code by default. The 3010 exit code means that a package has been successfully installed, but requires a reboot.

knife-acl is now built-in

The knife-acl gem is now part of Chef Infra Client. This gives you the ability to manage Chef organizations and ACLs directly.

YAML Recipes

We added support for writing recipes in YAML to provide a low-code syntax for simple use cases. To write recipes in YAML, Chef resources and any user-defined parameters can be added as elements in a resources hash, such as the example below: ​

---
resources:
  - type: "package"
    name: "httpd"
  - type: "template"
    name: "/var/www/html/index.html"
    source: "index.html.erb"
  - type: "service"
    name: "httpd"
    action:
      - enable
      - start

​ This implementation is restrictive and does not support arbitrary Ruby code, helper functions, or attributes. However, if the need for additional customization arises, YAML recipes can be automatically converted into the DSL via the knife yaml convert command.

Custom Resource Improvements

Improved property require behavior

As noted in the breaking changes above, we improved how the required value is set on custom resource properties, in order to give a more predictable behavior. This new behavior now allows you to specify actions where individual properties are required. This is especially useful when :create actions require certain properties that may not be required for a :remove type property.

Example required field defining specific actions:

property :password, String, required: [:create]

action :create do
  # code to create something
end

action :remove do
  # code to remove it that doesn't need a password
end

Resource Partials

Resource partials allow you to define reusable portions of code that can be included in multiple custom resources. This feature is particularly useful when there are common properties, such as authentication properties, that you want to define in a single location, but use for multiple resources. Internally in the Chef Infra Client codebase, we have already used this feature to remove duplicate properties from our subversion and git resources and make them easier to maintain.

Resource partials are stored in a cookbook's /resources directory just like existing custom resources, but they start with the _ prefix. They're then called using a new use helper within the resource where they're needed:

resources/_api_auth_properties.rb:

property :api_endpoint, String
property :api_key, String
property :api_retries, Integer

resources/mything.rb:

property :another_property, String
property :yet_another_property, String

use 'api_auth_properties'

action :create do
  # some create logic
end

The example above shows a resource partial that contains properties for use in multiple resources. You can also use resource partials to define helper methods that you want to use in your actions instead of defining the same helper methods in each action_class.

resources/_api_auth_helpers.rb:

def make_api_call(endpoint, value)
  # API call code here
end

resources/mything.rb:

property :another_property, String
property :yet_another_property, String

action :create do
  # some create logic
end

action_class do
  use 'api_auth_helpers'
end

after_resource

A new after_resource state has been added to resources that allows you to better control the resource state information reported to Chef Automate when a resource converges. If your custom resource uses the load_current_value helper, then this after state is calculated automatically. If you don't utilize the load_current_value helper and would like fine grained control over the state information sent to Chef Automate, you can use a new load_after_resource helper to load the state of each property for reporting.

identity Improvements

A resource's name property is now set to be the identity property by default and to have desired_state: false set by default. This eliminates the need to set identity: true, desired_state: false on these properties and better exposes identity data to handler and reporting.

compile_time property

The compile_time property is now defined for all custom resources, so there is no need to add your own compile-time logic to your resource.

Other Improvements

Up to 33% smaller on disk

We optimized the files that ship with Chef Infra Client and eliminated many unnecessary files from the installation, reducing the on-disk size of Chef Infra Client by up to 33%.

Windows Performance Improvements

We've optimized the Chef Infra Client for modern Windows releases and improved the performance on these systems.

Simpler Version Comparisons with node['platform_version']

The node['platform_version'] attribute returned from Ohai can now be intelligently compared as a version instead of as a String or Integer. Previously, to compare the platform_version, many users would first convert the version String to a Float with node['platform_version']. This introduced problems on many platforms, such as macOS, where macOS 10.9 would appear to be a greater version number than 10.15. You can now directly compare the version without converting it first.

Greater than or equal comparison:

node['platform_version'] >= '10.15'

Comparison using Ruby's pessimistic operator:

node['platform_version'] =~ '~> 10.15'

New helpers for recipes and resources

Several helpers introduced in Chef Infra Client 15.5 are now available for use in any resource or recipe. These helpers include:

sanitized_path

sanitize_path is a cross-platform method that returns the system's path along with the Chef Infra Client Ruby bin dir / gem bin dir and common system paths such as /sbin and /usr/local/bin.

which(foo)

The which helper searches the system's path and returns the first occurrence of a binary, similar to the which command on *nix systems. It also allows you to pass an extra_path value for additional directories to search.

which('systemctl')
which('my_app', extra_path: '/opt/my_app/bin')

eager_load_libraries metadata.rb setting

By default, Chef Infra Client eagerly loads all ruby files in each cookbook's libraries directory at runtime. A new metadata.rb option eager_load_libraries has been introduced and allows you to control if and when a cookbook library is loaded. Depending on the construction of your libraries, this new option may greatly improve the runtime performance of your cookbook. With eager loading disabled, you may manually load libraries included in your cookbook using Ruby's standard require method. Metadata.rb configuration options:

eager_load_libraries false # disable eager loading all libraries
eager_load_libraries 'helper_library.rb' # eager load just the file helper_library.rb
eager_load_libraries %w(helper_library_1.rb helper_library_2.rb) # eager load both helper_library_1.rb and helper_library_2.rb files

Note: Unless you are experiencing performance issues in your libraries, we advise against changing the loading behavior.

always_dump_stacktrace client.rb option

A new always_dump_stacktrace client.rb configuration option and command line option allows you to have any Ruby stacktraces from Chef Infra Client logged directly to the log file. This may help troubleshooting when used in conjunction with centralized logging systems such as Splunk. To enable this new option, run chef-client --always-dump-stacktrace or add the following to your client.rb:

always_dump_stacktrace true

Chef Vault Functionality Out of the Box

Chef Infra Client now ships with built-in Chef Vault functionality, so there's no need to depend on the chef-vault cookbook or gem. Chef Vault helpers chef_vault_item, chef_vault, and chef_vault_item_for_environment are included, as well as the chef_vault_secret resource. Additionally, the Chef Vault knife commands are also available out of the box. We do not recommend new users adopt the Chef Vault workflow due to limitations with autoscaling new systems, so these resources should only be consumed by existing Chef Vault users.

Ruby 2.7

Chef Infra Client's ruby installation has been updated to from Ruby 2.6 to Ruby 2.7, which includes many features available for use in resources and libraries.

See https://medium.com/rubyinside/whats-new-in-ruby-2-7-79c98b265502 for details on many of the new features.

Ohai 16 Improvements

Ohai has been improved to gather additional system configuration information for use when authoring recipes and resources.

filesystem2 Node Data available on Windows

In previous Chef Infra Clients we've introduced a modernized filesystem layout of Ohai data for many platforms. In Chef Infra Client 16.0, Windows now has this layout available in node['filesystem2']. In Chef Infra Client 17, it will replace node['filesystem'] to match all other platforms.

Extended Azure Metadata

The Azure Ohai plugin now gathers the latest version of the metadata provided by the Azure metadata endpoint. This greatly expands the information available on Azure instances. See Ohai PR 1427 for an example of the new data gathered.

New Ohai Plugins

New IPC and Interupts plugins have been added to Ohai. The IPC plugin exposes SysV IPC shmem information and interupts plugin exposes data from /proc/interrupts and /proc/irq. Thanks @jsvana and @davide125 for these new plugins.

Note: Both IPC and Interupts plugins are optional plugins, which are disabled by default. They can be enabled via your client.rb:

ohai.optional_plugins = [
  :IPC,
  :Interupts
]

Improved Linux Network Plugin Data

The Linux Network plugin has been improved to gather additional information from the ethtool utility. This includes the number of queues (ethtool -l), the coalesce parameters (ethtool -c), and information about the NIC driver (ethtool -i). Thanks @matt-c-clark for these improvements.

Windows DMI plugin

Windows systems now include a new DMI plugin which presents data in a similar format to the DMI plugin on *nix systems. This makes it easier to detect system information like manufacturer, serial number, or asset tag number in a cross-platform way.

New Platforms

Over the last quarter, we worked to greatly expand the platforms that we support with the addition of Chef Infra Client packages for Ubuntu 20.04 amd64, Amazon Linux 2 x86_64/aarch64, and Debian 10 amd64. With the release of Chef Infra Client 16, we expanded our platform support again with the following new platforms:

  • RHEL 8 aarch64
  • Ubuntu 20.04 aarch64
  • SLES 16 aarch64

Newly Introduced Deprecations

Several legacy Windows helpers have been deprecated as they will always return true when running on Chef Infra Client's currently supported platforms. The helpers previously detected systems prior to Windows 2012 and systems running Windows Nano, which has been discontinued by Microsoft. These helpers were never documented externally so their usage is most likely minimal. A new Cookstyle rule has been introduced to detect the usage of older_than_win_2012_or_8?: ChefDeprecations/DeprecatedWindowsVersionCheck.

  • Chef::Platform.supports_msi?
  • Chef::Platform.older_than_win_2012_or_8?
  • Chef::Platform.supports_powershell_execution_bypass?
  • Chef::Platform.windows_nano_server?

Chef Infra Client 15.10

Improvements

  • The systemd_unit resource now respects the sensitive property and will no longer output the contents of the unit file to logs if this is set.
  • A new arm? helper has been added which can be used in recipes and resources to determine if a system is on the ARM architecture.

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved a bug that prevented users from bootstrapping nodes using knife when specifying the --use_sudo_password.
  • Resolved a bug that prevented the --bootstrap-version flag from being honored when bootstrapping in knife.

Chef InSpec 4.18.104

  • Resolved a regression that prevented the service resource from working correctly on Windows. Thanks @Axuba
  • Implemented VMware and Hyper-V detection on Linux systems
  • Implemented VMware, Hyper-V, Virtualbox, KVM and Xen detection on Windows systems
  • Added helpers virtual_system? and physical_system?. Thanks @tecracer-theinen

Ohai 15.9

  • Improve the resilency of the Shard plugin when dmidecode cannot be found on a system. Thanks @jaymzh
  • Fixed detection of Openstack guests via DMI data. Thanks @ramereth

Platform Support

Amazon Linux 2

Chef Infra Client is now tested on Amazon Linux 2 running on x86_64 and aarch64 with packages available on the Chef Downloads Page.

Chef Infra Client 15.9

Chef InSpec 4.18.100

Chef InSpec has been updated from 4.18.85 to 4.18.100:

  • Resolved several failures in executing resources
  • Fixed auditd resource processing of action and list
  • Fixed platform detection when running in Habitat
  • "inspec schema" has been revised to be in the JSON Schema draft 7 format
  • Improved the functionality of the oracledb_session resource

Ohai 15.8

Ohai has been updated to 15.8.0 which includes a fix for failures that occurred in the OpenStack plugin (thanks @sawanoboly) and improved parsing of data in the optional_plugins config option (thanks @salzig).

Resource Improvements

build_essential

The build_essential resource has been updated to better detect if the Xcode CLI Tools package needs to be installed on macOS. macOS 10.15 (Catalina) is now supported with this update. Thank you @w0de for kicking this work off, @jazaval for advice on macOS package parsing, and Microsoft for their work in the macOS cookbook.

rhsm_errata / rhsm_errata_level

The rhsm_errata and rhsm_errata_level resources have been updated to properly function on RHEL 8 systems.

rhsm_register

The rhsm_register resource has a new property https_for_ca_consumer that enables using https connections during registration. Thanks for this improvement @jasonwbarnett. This resource has also been updated to properly function on RHEL 8.

windows_share

Resolved failures in the windows_share resource when setting the path property. Thanks for reporting this issue @Kundan22.

Platform Support

Ubuntu 20.04

Chef Infra Client is now tested on Ubuntu 20.04 (AMD64) with packages available on the Chef Downloads Page.

Ubuntu 18.04 aarch64

Chef Infra Client is now tested on Ubuntu 18.04 aarch64 with packages available on the Chef Downloads Page.

Windows 10

Our Windows 10 Chef Infra Client packages now receive an additional layer of testing to ensure they function as expected.

Security Updates

Ruby

Ruby has been updated from 2.6.5 to 2.6.6 to resolve the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2020-16255: Unsafe Object Creation Vulnerability in JSON (Additional fix)
  • CVE-2020-10933: Heap exposure vulnerability in the socket library

libarchive

libarchive has been updated from 3.4.0 to 3.4.2 to resolve multiple security vulnerabilities including the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2019-19221: archive_wstring_append_from_mbs in archive_string.c has an out-of-bounds read because of an incorrect mbrtowc or mbtowc call
  • CVE-2020-9308: archive_read_support_format_rar5.c in libarchive before 3.4.2 attempts to unpack a RAR5 file with an invalid or corrupted header

Chef Infra Client 15.8

New notify_group functionality

Chef Infra Client now includes a new notify_group feature that can be used to extract multiple common notifies out of individual resources to reduce duplicate code in your cookbooks and custom resources. Previously cookbook authors would often use a log resource to achieve a similar outcome, but using the log resource results in unnecessary Chef Infra Client log output. The notify_group method produces no additional logging, but fires all defined notifications when the :run action is set.

Example notify_group that stops, sleeps, and then starts service when a service config is updated:

  service "crude" do
    action [ :enable, :start ]
  end

  chef_sleep "60" do
    action :nothing
  end

  notify_group "crude_stop_and_start" do
    notifies :stop, "service[crude]", :immediately
    notifies :sleep, "chef_sleep[60]", :immediately
    notifies :start, "service[crude]", :immediately
  end

  template "/etc/crude/crude.conf" do
    source "crude.conf.erb"
    variables node["crude"]
    notifies :run, "notify_group[crude_stop_and_start]", :immediately
  end

Chef InSpec 4.18.85

Chef InSpec has been updated from 4.18.39 to 4.18.85. This release includes a large number of bug fixes in addition to some great resource enhancements:

  • The service resource features new support for yocto-based linux distributions. Thank you to @michaellihs for this addition!
  • The package resource now includes support for FreeBSD. Thank you to @fzipi for this work!
  • We standardized the platform for the etc_hosts, virtualization, ini, and xml resources.
  • The oracledb_session resource works again due to a missing quote fix.
  • The groups resource on macOS no longer reports duplicates anymore. command.exist? now conforms to POSIX standards. Thanks to @PiQuer!
  • Changed the postfix_conf resource's supported platform to the broader unix. Thank you to @fzipi for this fix!

New Cookbook Helpers

New helpers have been added to make writing cookbooks easier.

Platform Version Helpers

New helpers for checking platform versions have been added. These helpers return parsed version strings so there's no need to convert the returned values to Integers or Floats before comparing them. Additionally, comparisons with version objects properly understand the order of versions so 5.11 will compare as larger than 5.9, whereas converting those values to Floats would result in 5.9 being larger than 5.11.

  • windows_nt_version returns the NT kernel version which often differs from Microsoft's marketing versions. This helper offers a good way to find desktop and server releases that are based on the same codebase. For example, NT 6.3 is both Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012 R2.
  • powershell_version returns the version of PowerShell installed on the system.
  • platform_version returns the value of node['platform_version'].

Example comparison using windows_nt_version:

if windows_nt_version >= 10
  some_modern_windows_things
end

Cloud Helpers

The cloud helpers from chef-sugar have been ported to Chef Infra Client:

  • cloud? - if the node is running in any cloud, including internal clouds
  • ec2? - if the node is running in ec2
  • gce? - if the node is running in gce
  • rackspace? - if the node is running in rackspace
  • eucalyptus? - if the node is running under eucalyptus
  • linode? - if the node is running in linode
  • openstack? - if the node is running under openstack
  • azure? - if the node is running in azure
  • digital_ocean? - if the node is running in digital ocean
  • softlayer? - if the node is running in softlayer

Virtualization Helpers

The virtualization helpers from chef-sugar have been ported to Chef Infra Client and extended with helpers to detect hypervisor hosts, physical, and guest systems.

  • kvm? - if the node is a kvm guest
  • kvm_host? - if the node is a kvm host
  • lxc? - if the node is an lxc guest
  • lxc_host? - if the node is an lxc host
  • parallels?- if the node is a parallels guest
  • parallels_host?- if the node is a parallels host
  • vbox? - if the node is a virtualbox guest
  • vbox_host? - if the node is a virtualbox host
  • vmware? - if the node is a vmware guest
  • vmware_host? - if the node is a vmware host
  • openvz? - if the node is an openvz guest
  • openvz_host? - if the node is an openvz host
  • guest? - if the node is detected as any kind of guest
  • hypervisor? - if the node is detected as being any kind of hypervisor
  • physical? - the node is not running as a guest (may be a hypervisor or may be bare-metal)
  • vagrant? - attempts to identify the node as a vagrant guest (this check may be error-prone)

include_recipe? helper

chef-sugar's include_recipe? has been added to Chef Infra Client providing a simple way to see if a recipe has been included on a node already.

Example usage in a not_if conditional:

execute 'install my_app'
  command '/tmp/my_app_install.sh'
  not_if { include_recipe?('my_app::install') }
end

Updated Resources

ifconfig

The ifconfig resource now supports the newer ifconfig release that ships in Debian 10.

mac_user

The mac_user resource, used when creating a user on Mac systems, has been improved to work better with macOS Catalina (10.15). The resource now properly looks up the numeric GID when creating a user, once again supports the system property, and includes a new hidden property which prevents the user from showing on the login screen. Thanks @chilcote for these fixes and improvements.

sysctl

The sysctl resource has been updated to allow the inclusion of descriptive comments. Comments may be passed as an array or as a string. Any comments provided are prefixed with '#' signs and precede the sysctl setting in generated files.

An example:

sysctl 'vm.swappiness' do
  value 10
  comment [
     "define how aggressively the kernel will swap memory pages.",
     "Higher values will increase aggressiveness",
     "lower values decrease the amount of swap.",
     "A value of 0 instructs the kernel not to initiate swap",
     "until the amount of free and file-backed pages is less",
     "than the high water mark in a zone.",
     "The default value is 60."
    ]
end

which results in /etc/sysctl.d/99-chef-vm.swappiness.conf as follows:

# define how aggressively the kernel will swap memory pages.
# Higher values will increase aggressiveness
# lower values decrease the amount of swap.
# A value of 0 instructs the kernel not to initiate swap
# until the amount of free and file-backed pages is less
# than the high water mark in a zone.
# The default value is 60.
vm.swappiness = 10

Platform Support

  • Chef Infra Clients packages are now validated for Debian 10.

macOS Binary Signing

Each binary in the macOS Chef Infra Client installation is now signed to improve the integrity of the installation and ensure compatibility with macOS Catalina security requirements.

Chef Infra Client 15.7

Updated Resources

archive_file

The archive_file resource will now only change ownership on files and directories that were part of the archive itself. This prevents changing permissions on important high level directories such as /etc or /bin when you extract a file into those directories. Thanks for this fix, @bobchaos.

cron and cron_d

The cron and cron_d resources now include a timeout property, which allows you to configure actions to perform when a job times out. This property accepts a hash of timeout configuration options:

  • preserve-status: true/false with a default of false
  • foreground: true/false with a default of false
  • kill-after: Integer for the timeout in seconds
  • signal: String or Integer to send to the process such as HUP

launchd

The launchd resource has been updated to properly capitalize HardResourceLimits. Thanks for this fix, @rb2k.

sudo

The sudo resource no longer fails on the second Chef Infra Client run when using a Cmnd_Alias. Thanks for reporting this issue, @Rudikza.

user

The user resource on AIX no longer forces the user to change the password after Chef Infra Client modifies the password. Thanks for this fix, @Triodes.

The user resource on macOS 10.15 has received several important fixes to improve logging and prevent failures.

windows_task

The windows_task resource is now idempotent when a system is joined to a domain and the job runs under a local user account.

x509_certificate

The x509_certificate resource now includes a new renew_before_expiry property that allows you to auto renew certicates a specified number of days before they expire. Thanks @julienhuon for this improvement.

Additional Recipe Helpers

We have added new helpers for identifying Windows releases that can be used in any part of your cookbooks.

windows_workstation?

Returns true if the system is a Windows Workstation edition.

windows_server?

Returns true if the system is a Windows Server edition.

windows_server_core?

Returns true if the system is a Windows Server Core edition.

Notable Changes and Fixes

  • knife upload and knife cookbook upload will now generate a metadata.json file from metadata.rb when uploading a cookbook to the Chef Infra Server.
  • A bug in knife bootstrap behavior that caused failures when bootstrapping Windows hosts from non-Windows hosts and vice versa has been resolved.
  • The existing system path is now preserved when bootstrapping Windows nodes. Thanks for this fix, @Xorima.
  • Ohai now properly returns the drive name on Windows and includes new drive_type fields to allow you to determine the type of attached disk. Thanks for this improvement @sshock.
  • Ohai has been updated to properly return DMI data to Chef Infra Client. Thanks for troubleshooting this, @zmscwx and @Sliim.

Platform Support

  • Chef Infra Clients packages are no longer produced for Windows 2008 R2 as this release reached its end of life on Jan 14th, 2020.
  • Chef Infra Client packages are no longer produced for RHEL 6 on the s390x platform. Builds will continue to be published for RHEL 7 on the s390x platform.

Security Updates

OpenSSL

OpenSSL has been updated to 1.0.2u to resolve CVE-2019-1551

Chef Infra Client 15.6

Updated Resources

apt_repository

The apt_repository resource now properly escapes repository URIs instead of quoting them. This prevents failures when using the apt-file command, which was unable to parse the quoted URIs. Thanks for reporting this @Seb-Solon

file

The file resource now shows the output of any failures when running commands specified in the verify property. This means you can more easily validate config files before potentially writing an incorrect file to disk. Chef Infra Client will shellout to any specified command and will show the results of failures for further troubleshooting.

user

The user resource on Linux systems now continues successfully when usermod returns an exit code of 12. Exit code 12 occurs when a user's home directory is changed and the underlying directory already exists. Thanks @skippyj for this fix.

yum_repository

The yum_repository now properly formats the repository configuration when multiple baseurl values are present. Thanks @bugok for this fix.

Performance Improvements

This release of Chef Infra Client ships with several optimizations to our Ruby installation to improve the performance of loading the chef-client and knife commands. These improvements are particularly noticeable on non-SSD hosts and on Windows.

Smaller Install Footprint

We've further optimized our install footprint and reduced the size of /opt/chef by ~7% by removing unnecessary test files and libraries that shipped in previous releases.

filesystem2 Ohai Data on Windows

Ohai 15.6 includes new node['filesystem2'] data on Windows hosts. Fileystem2 presents filesystem data by both mountpoint and by device name. This data structure matches that of the filesystem plugin on Linux and other *nix operating systems. Thanks @jaymzh for this new data structure.

Chef Infra Client 15.5.15

The Chef Infra Client 15.5.15 release includes fixes for two regressions. A regression in the build_essential resource caused failures on rhel platforms and a second regression caused Chef Infra Client to fail when starting with enforce_path_sanity enabled. As part of this fix we've added a new property, raise_if_unsupported, to the build-essential resource. Instead of silently continuing, this property will fail a Chef Infra Client run if an unknown platform is encountered.

We've also updated the windows_package resource. The resource will now provide better error messages if invalid options are passed to the installer_type property and the checksum property will now accept uppercase SHA256 checksums.

Chef Infra Client 15.5.9

New Cookbook Helpers

Chef Infra Client now includes a new chef-utils gem, which ships with a large number of helpers to make writing cookbooks easier. Many of these helpers existed previously in the chef-sugar gem. We have renamed many of the named helpers for consistency, while providing backwards compatibility with existing chef-sugar names. Existing cookbooks written with chef-sugar should work unmodified with any of these new helpers. Expect a Cookstyle rule in the near future to help you update existing chef-sugar code to use the newer built-in helpers.

For more information all all of the new helpers available, see the chef-utils readme

Chefignore Improvements

We've reworked how chefignore files are handled in knife, which has allowed us to close out a large number of long outstanding bugs. knife will now traverse all the way up the directory structure looking for a chefignore file. This means you can place a chefignore file in each cookbook or any parent directory in your repository structure. Additionally, we have made fixes that ensure that commands like knife diff and knife cookbook upload always honor your chefignore files.

Windows Habitat Plan

Official Habitat packages of Chef Infra Client are now available for Windows. It has all the executables of the traditional omnibus packages, but in Habitat form. You can find it in the Habitat Builder under chef/chef-infra-client.

Performance Improvements

This release of Chef Infra Client ships with several optimizations to our Ruby installation that improve the performance of the chef-client and knife commands, especially on Windows systems. Expect to see more here in future releases.

Chef InSpec 4.18.39

Chef InSpec has been updated from 4.17.17 to 4.18.38. This release includes a large number of bug fixes in addition to some great resource enhancements:

  • Inputs can now be used within a describe.one block
  • The service resource now includes a startname property for Windows and systemd services
  • The interface resource now includes a name property
  • The user resource now better supports Windows with the addition of passwordage, maxbadpasswords, and badpasswordattempts properties
  • The nginx resource now includes parsing support for wildcard, dot prefix, and regex
  • The iis_app_pool resource now handles empty app pools
  • The filesystem resource now supports devices with very long names
  • The apt better handles URIs and supports repos with an arch
  • The oracledb_session has received multiple fixes to make it work better
  • The npm resource now works under sudo on Unix and on Windows with a custom PATH

New Resources

chef_sleep

The chef_sleep resource can be used to sleep for a specified number of seconds during a Chef Infra Client run. This may be helpful to use with other commands that return a completed status before they are actually ready. In general, do not use this resource unless you truly need it.

Using with a Windows service that starts, but is not immediately ready:

service 'Service that is slow to start and reports as started' do
  service_name 'my_database'
  action :start
  notifies :sleep, chef_sleep['wait for service start']
end

chef_sleep 'wait for service start' do
  seconds 30
  action :nothing
end

Updated Resources

systemd_unit / service

The systemd_unit and service resources (when on systemd) have been updated to not re-enable services with an indirect status. Thanks @jaymzh for this fix.

windows_firewall

The windows_firewall resource has been updated to support passing in an array of profiles in the profile property. Thanks @Happycoil for this improvement.

Security Updates

libxslt

libxslt has been updated to 1.1.34 to resolve CVE-2019-13118.

Chef Infra Client 15.4

converge_if_changed Improvements

Chef Infra Client will now take into account any default values specified in custom resources when making converge determinations with the converge_if_changed helper. Previously, default values would be ignored, which caused necessary changes to be skipped. Note: This change may cause behavior changes for some users, but we believe this original behavior is an impacting bug for enough users to make it outside of a major release. Thanks @ jakauppila for reporting this.

Bootstrap Improvements

Several improvements have been made to the knife bootstrap command to make it more reliable and secure:

  • File creation is now wrapped in a umask to avoid potential race conditions
  • NameError and RuntimeError failures during bootstrap have been resolved
  • Undefined method 'empty?' for nil:NilClass during bootstrap have been resolved
  • Single quotes in attributes during bootstrap no longer result in bootstrap failures
  • The bootstrap command no longer appears in PS on the host while bootstrapping is running

knife supermarket list Improvements

The knife supermarket list command now includes two new options:

  • --sort-by [recently_updated recently_added most_downloaded most_followed]: Sort cookbooks returned from the Supermarket API
  • --owned_by: Limit returned cookbooks to a particular owner

Updated Resources

chocolatey_package

The chocolatey_package resource no longer fails when passing options with the options property. Thanks for reporting this issue @kenmacleod.

kernel_module

The kernel_module resource includes a new options property, which allows users to set module specific parameters and settings. Thanks @ramereth for this new feature.

Example of a kernel_module resource using the new options property:

  kernel_module 'loop' do
  options [ 'max_loop=4', 'max_part=8' ]
  end

remote_file

The remote_file resource has been updated to better display progress when using the show_progress resource. Thanks for reporting this issue @isuftin.

sudo

The sudo resource now runs sudo config validation against all of the sudo configuration files on the system instead of only the file being written. This allows us to detect configuration errors that occur when configs conflict with each other. Thanks for reporting this issue @drzewiec.

windows_ad_join

The windows_ad_join has a new :leave action for leaving an Active Directory domain and rejoining a workgroup. This new action also has a new workgroup_name property for specifying the workgroup to join upon leaving the domain. Thanks @jasonwbarnett for adding this new action.

Example of leaving a domain

windows_ad_join 'Leave the domain' do
  workgroup_name 'local'
  action :leave
end

windows_package

The windows_package resource no longer updates environmental variables before installing the package. This prevents potential modifications that may cause a package installation to fail. Thanks @jeremyhage for this fix.

windows_service

The windows_service resource no longer updates the service and triggers notifications if the case of the run_as_user property does not match the user set on the service. Thanks @jasonwbarnett for this fix.

windows_share

The windows_share resource is now fully idempotent by better validating the provided path property from the user. Thanks @Happycoil for this fix.

Security Updates

Ruby

Ruby has been updated from 2.6.4 to 2.6.5 in order to resolve the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2019-16255: A code injection vulnerability of Shell#[] and Shell#test
  • CVE-2019-16254: HTTP response splitting in WEBrick (Additional fix)
  • CVE-2019-15845: A NUL injection vulnerability of File.fnmatch and File.fnmatch?
  • CVE-2019-16201: Regular Expression Denial of Service vulnerability of WEBrick's Digest access authentication

Chef Infra Client 15.3

Custom Resource Unified Mode

Chef Infra Client 15.3 introduces an exciting new way to easily write custom resources that mix built-in Chef Infra resources with Ruby code. Previously custom resources would use Chef Infra's standard compile and converge phases, which meant that Ruby would be evaluated first and then the resources would be converged. This often results in confusing and undesirable behavior when you are trying to mix resources with Ruby logic. Many custom resource authors would attempt to get around this by forcing resources to run at compile time so that all the code in their resource would execute during the compile phase.

An example of forcing a resource to run at compile time:

resource_name 'foo' do
  action :nothing
end.run_action(:some_action)

With unified mode, you opt in to a single phase per resource where all Ruby and Chef Infra resources are executed at once. This makes it far easier to determine how your code will be evaluated and run. Additionally, you no longer need to force any resources to run at compile time, as all code is run in the compile phase. To enable this new mode just add unified_mode true to your resources like this:

property :Some_property, String

unified_mode true

action :create do
  # some code
end

Interval Mode Now Fails on Windows

Chef Infra Client 15.3 will now raise an error if you attempt to keep the chef-client process running long-term by enabling interval runs. Interval runs have already raised failures on non-Windows platforms and we've suggested that users move away from them on Windows for many years. The long-running chef-client process on Windows will load and reload cookbooks over each other in memory. This could produce a running state which is not a representation of the cookbook code that the authors wrote or tested, and behavior that may be wildly different depending on how long the chef-client process has been running and on the sequence that the cookbooks were uploaded.

Updated Resources

ifconfig

The ifconfig resource has been updated to properly support interfaces with a hyphen in their name. This is most commonly encountered with bridge interfaces that are named br-1234.

archive_file

The archive_file resource now supports archives in the RAR 5.0 format as well as zip files compressed using xz, lzma, ppmd8 and bzip2 compression.

user

macOS 10.14 / 10.15 support

The user resource now supports the creation of users on macOS 10.14 and 10.15 systems. The updated resource now complies with macOS TCC policies by using a user with admin privileges to create and modify users. The following new properties have been added for macOS user creation:

  • admin sets a user to be an admin.

  • admin_username and admin_password define the admin user credentials required for toggling SecureToken for a user. The value of 'admin_username' must correspond to a system user that is part of the 'admin' with SecureToken enabled in order to toggle SecureToken.

  • secure_token is a boolean property that sets the desired state for SecureToken. FileVault requires a SecureToken for full disk encryption.

  • secure_token_password is the plaintext password required to enable or disable secure_token for a user. If no salt is specified we assume the 'password' property corresponds to a plaintext password and will attempt to use it in place of secure_token_password if it is not set.

Password property is now sensitive

The password property is now set to sensitive to prevent the password from being shown in debug or failure logs.

gid property can now be a string

The gid property now allows specifying the user's gid as a string. For example:

user 'tim' do
  gid '123'
end

Platform Support Updates

macOS 10.15 Support

Chef Infra Client is now validated against macOS 10.15 (Catalina) with packages now available at downloads.chef.io and via the Omnitruck API. Additionally, Chef Infra Client will no longer be validated against macOS 10.12.

AIX 7.2

Chef Infra Client is now validated against AIX 7.2 with packages now available at downloads.chef.io and via the Omnitruck API.

Chef InSpec 4.16

Chef InSpec has been updated from 4.10.4 to 4.16.0 with the following changes:

  • A new postfix_conf has been added for inspecting Postfix configuration files.
  • A new plugins section has been added to the InSpec configuration file which can be used to pass secrets or other configurations into Chef InSpec plugins.
  • The service resource now includes a new startname property for determining which user is starting the Windows services.
  • The groups resource now properly gathers membership information on macOS hosts.

Security Updates

Ruby

Ruby has been updated from 2.6.3 to 2.6.4 in order to resolve CVE-2012-6708 and CVE-2015-9251.

openssl

openssl has been updated from 1.0.2s to 1.0.2t in order to resolve CVE-2019-1563 and CVE-2019-1547.

nokogiri

nokogori has been updated from 1.10.2 to 1.10.4 in order to resolve CVE-2019-5477

Chef Infra Client 15.2

Updated Resources

dnf_package

The dnf_package resource has been updated to fully support RHEL 8.

kernel_module

The kernel_module now supports a :disable action. Thanks @tomdoherty.

rhsm_repo

The rhsm_repo resource has been updated to support passing a repo name of * in the :disable action. Thanks for reporting this issue @erinn.

windows_task

The windows_task resource has been updated to allow the day property to accept an Integer value.

zypper_package

The zypper_package package has been updated to properly upgrade packages if necessary based on the version specified in the resource block. Thanks @foobarbam for this fix.

Platform Support Updates

RHEL 8 Support Added

Chef Infra Client 15.2 now includes native packages for RHEL 8 with all builds now validated on RHEL 8 hosts.

SLES 11 EOL

Packages will no longer be built for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 as SLES 11 exited the 'General Support' phase on March 31, 2019. See Chef's Platform End-of-Life Policy for more information on when Chef ends support for an OS release.

Ubuntu 14.04 EOL

Packages will no longer be built for Ubuntu 14.04 as Canonical ended maintenance updates on April 30, 2019. See Chef's Platform End-of-Life Policy for more information on when Chef ends support for an OS release.

Ohai 15.2

Ohai has been updated to 15.2 with the following changes:

  • Improved detection of Openstack including proper detection of Windows nodes running on Openstack when fetching metadata. Thanks @jjustice6.
  • A new other_versions field has been added to the Packages plugin when the node is using RPM. This allows you to see all installed versions of packages, not just the latest version. Thanks @jjustice6.
  • The Linux Network plugin has been improved to not mark interfaces down if stp_state is marked as down. Thanks @josephmilla.
  • Arch running on ARM processors is now detected as the arm platform. Thanks @BackSlasher.

Chef InSpec 4.10.4

Chef InSpec has been updated from 4.6.4 to 4.10.4 with the following changes:

  • Fix handling multiple triggers in the windows_task resource
  • Fix exceptions when resources are used with incompatible transports
  • Un-deprecate the be_running matcher on the service resource
  • Add resource sys_info.manufacturer and sys_info.model
  • Add ip6tables resource

Security Updates

bzip2

bzip2 has been updated from 1.0.6 to 1.0.8 to resolve CVE-2016-3189 and CVE-2019-12900.

Chef Infra Client 15.1

New Resources

chocolatey_feature

The chocolatey_feature resource allows you to enable and disable Chocolatey features. See the chocolatey_feature documentation for full usage information. Thanks @gep13 for this new resource.

Updated Resources

chocolatey_source

The chocolatey_source resource has been updated with new enable and disable actions, as well as admin_only and allow_self_service properties. Thanks @gep13 for this enhancement.

launchd

The launchd resource has been updated with a new launch_events property, which allows you to specify higher-level event types to be used as launch-on-demand event sources. Thanks @chilcote for this enhancement.

yum_package

The yum_package resource's helper for interacting with the yum subsystem has been updated to always close out the rpmdb lock, even during failures. This may prevent the rpmdb becoming locked in some rare conditions. Thanks for reporting this issue, @lytao.

template

The template resource now provides additional information on failures, which is especially useful in ChefSpec tests. Thanks @brodock for this enhancement.

Target Mode Improvements

Our experimental Target Mode received a large number of updates in Chef Infra Client 15.1. Target Mode now reuses the connection to the remote system, which greatly speeds up the remote Chef Infra run. There is also now support for Target Mode in the systemd_unit, log, ruby_block, and breakpoint resources. Keep in mind that when using ruby_block with Target Mode that the Ruby code in the block will execute locally as there is not necessarily a Ruby runtime on the remote host.

Ohai 15.1

Ohai has been updated to 15.1 with the following changes:

  • The Shard plugin properly uses the machine's machinename, serial, and uuid attributes to generate the shard value. The plugin also no longer throws an exception on macOS hosts. Thanks @michel-slm for these fixes.
  • The Virtualbox plugin has been enhanced to gather information on running guests, storage, and networks when VirtualBox is installed on a node. Thanks @freakinhippie for this new capability.
  • Ohai no longer fails to gather interface information on Solaris in some rare conditions. Thanks @devoptimist for this fix.

Chef InSpec 4.6.4

Chef InSpec has been updated from 4.3.2 to 4.6.4 with the following changes:

  • InSpec Attributes have now been renamed to Inputs to avoid confusion with Chef Infra attributes.
  • A new InSpec plugin type of Input has been added for defining new input types. See the InSpec Plugins documentation for more information on writing these plugins.
  • InSpec no longer prints errors to the stdout when passing --format json.
  • When fetching profiles from GitHub, the URL can now include periods.
  • The performance of InSpec startup has been improved.

Chef Infra Client 15.0.300

This release includes critical bugfixes for the 15.0 release:

  • Fix knife bootstrap over SSH when requiretty is configured on the host.
  • Added the --chef-license CLI flag to chef-apply and chef-solo commands.

Chef Infra Client 15.0.298

This release includes critical bugfixes for the 15.0 release:

  • Allow accepting the license on non-interactive Windows sessions
  • Resolve license acceptance failures on Windows 2012 R2
  • Improve some knife and chef-client help text
  • Properly handle session_timeout default value in knife bootstrap
  • Avoid failures due to Train::Transports::SSHFailed class not being loaded in knife bootstrap
  • Resolve failures using the ca_trust_file option with knife bootstrap

Chef Infra Client 15.0.293

Chef Client is now Chef Infra Client

Chef Client has a new name, but don't worry, it's the same Chef Client you've grown used to. You'll notice new branding throughout the application, help, and documentation but the command line name of chef-client remains the same.

Chef EULA

Chef Infra Client requires an EULA to be accepted by users before it can run. Users can accept the EULA in a variety of ways:

  • chef-client --chef-license accept
  • chef-client --chef-license accept-no-persist
  • CHEF_LICENSE="accept" chef-client
  • CHEF_LICENSE="accept-no-persist" chef-client

Finally, if users run chef-client without any of these options, they will receive an interactive prompt asking for license acceptance. If the license is accepted, a marker file will be written to the filesystem unless accept-no-persist is specified. Once this marker file is persisted, users no longer need to set any of these flags.

See our Frequently Asked Questions document for more information on the EULA and license acceptance.

New Features / Functionality

Target Mode Prototype

Chef Infra Client 15 adds a prototype for a new method of executing resources called Target Mode. Target Mode allows a Chef Infra Client run to manage a remote system over SSH or another protocol supported by the Train library. This support includes platforms that we currently support like Ubuntu Linux, but also allows for configuring other architectures and platforms, such as switches that do not have native builds of Chef Infra Client. Target Mode maintains a separate node object for each target and allows you to manage that node using existing patterns that you currently use.

As of this release, only the execute resource and guards are supported, but modifying existing resources or writing new resources to support Target Mode is relatively easy. Using Target Mode is as easy as running chef-client --target hostname. The authentication credentials should be stored in your local ~/.chef/credentials file with the hostname of the target node as the profile name. Each key/value pair is passed to Train for authentication.

Data Collection Ground-Up Refactor

Chef Infra Client's Data Collection subsystem is used to report node changes during client runs to Chef Automate or other reporting systems. For Chef Infra Client 15, we performed a ground-up rewrite of this subsystem, which greatly improves the data reported to Chef Automate and ensures data is delivered even in the toughest of failure conditions.

copy_properties_from in Custom Resources

A new copy_properties_from method for custom resources allows you copy properties from your custom resource into other resources you are calling, so you can avoid unnecessarily repeating code.

To inherit all the properties of another resource:

resource_name :my_resource

property :mode, String, default: '777'
property :owner, String, default: 'app_user'
property :group, String, default: 'admins'

directory '/etc/myapp' do
  copy_properties_from new_resource
  recursive true
end

To selectively inherit certain properties from a resource:

resource_name :my_resource

property :mode, String, default: '777'
property :owner, String, default: 'app_user'
property :group, String, default: 'admins'

directory '/etc/myapp' do
  copy_properties_from(new_resource, :owner, :group, :mode)
  mode '755'
  recursive true
end

ed25519 SSH key support

Our underlying SSH implementation has been updated to support the new ed25519 SSH key format. This means you will be able to use knife bootstrap and knife ssh on hosts that only support this new key format.

Allow Using --delete-entire-chef-repo in Chef Local Mode

Chef Solo's --delete-entire-chef-repo option has been extended to work in Local Mode as well. Be warned that this flag does exactly what it states, and when used incorrectly, can result in loss of work.

New Resources

archive_file resource

Use the archive_file resource to decompress multiple archive formats without the need for compression tools on the host.

See the archive_file documentation for more information.

windows_uac resource

Use the windows_uac resource to configure UAC settings on Windows hosts.

See the windows_uac documentation for more information.

windows_dfs_folder resource

Use the windows_dfs_folder resource to create and delete Windows DFS folders.

See the windows_dfs_folder documentation for more information.

windows_dfs_namespace resources

Use the windows_dfs_namespace resource to create and delete Windows DFS namespaces.

See the windows_dfs_namespace documentation for more information.

windows_dfs_server resources

Use the windows_dfs_server resource to configure Windows DFS server settings.

See the windows_dfs_server documentation for more information.

windows_dns_record resource

Use the windows_dns_record resource to create or delete DNS records.

See the windows_dns_record documentation for more information.

windows_dns_zone resource

Use the windows_dns_zone resource to create or delete DNS zones.

See the windows_dns_zone documentation for more information.

snap_package resource

Use the snap_package resource to install snap packages on Ubuntu hosts.

See the snap_package documentation for more information.

Resource Improvements

windows_task

The windows_task resource now supports the Start When Available option with a new start_when_available property.

locale

The locale resource now allows setting all possible LC_* environmental variables.

directory

The directory resource now property supports passing deny_rights :write on Windows nodes.

windows_service

The windows_service resource has been improved to prevent accidentally reverting a service back to default settings in a subsequent definition.

This example will no longer result in the MyApp service reverting to default RunAsUser:

windows_service 'MyApp' do
  run_as_user 'MyAppsUser'
  run_as_password 'MyAppsUserPassword'
  startup_type :automatic
  delayed_start true
  action [:configure, :start]
end

...

windows_service 'MyApp' do
  startup_type :automatic
  action [:configure, :start]
end

Ruby 2.6.3

Chef now ships with Ruby 2.6.3. This new version of Ruby improves performance and includes many new features to make more advanced Chef usage easier. See https://www.rubyguides.com/2018/11/ruby-2-6-new-features/ for a list of some of the new functionality.

Ohai Improvements

Improved Linux Platform / Platform Family Detection

Platform and platform_family detection on Linux has been rewritten to utilize the latest config files on modern Linux distributions before falling back to slower and fragile legacy detection methods. Ohai will now begin by parsing the contents of /etc/os-release for OS information if available. This feature improves the reliability of detection on modern distros and allows detection of new distros as they are released.

With this change, we now detect sles_sap as a member of the suse platform_family. Additionally, this change corrects our detection of the platform_version on Cisco Nexus switches where previously the build number was incorrectly appended to the version string.

Improved Virtualization Detection

Hypervisor detection on multiple platforms has been updated to use DMI data and a single set of hypervisors. This greatly improves the detection of hypervisors on Windows, BSD and Solaris platforms. It also means that as new hypervisor detection is added in the future, we will automatically support the majority of platforms.

Fix Windows 2016 FQDN Detection

Ohai 14 incorrectly detected a Windows 2016 node's fqdn as the node's hostname. Ohai 15 now correctly reports the FQDN value.

Improved Memory Usage

Ohai now uses less memory due to internal optimization of how we track plugin information.

FIPS Detection Improvements

The FIPS plugin now uses the built-in FIPS detection in Ruby for improved detection.

New Deprecations

knife cookbook site deprecated in favor of knife supermarket

The knife cookbook site command has been deprecated in favor of the knife supermarket command. knife cookbook site will now produce a warning message. In Chef Infra Client 16, we will remove the knife cookbook site command entirely.

locale LC_ALL property

The LC_ALL property in the locale resource has been deprecated as the usage of this environmental variable is not recommended by distribution maintainers.

Breaking Changes

Knife Bootstrap

Knife bootstrap has been entirely rewritten. Native support for Windows bootstrapping is now a part of the main knife bootstrap command. This marks the deprecation of the knife-windows plugin's bootstrap behavior. This change also addresses CVE-2015-8559: The knife bootstrap command in chef leaks the validator.pem private RSA key to /var/log/messages.

Important: knife bootstrap can bootstrap all supported versions of Chef Infra Client. Older versions may continue to work as far back as 12.20.

In order to accommodate a combined bootstrap that supports both SSH and WinRM, some CLI flags have been added, removed, or changed. Using the changed options will result in deprecation warnings, but knife bootstrap will accept those options unless otherwise noted. Using removed options will cause the command to fail.

New Flags

Flag Description
--max-wait SECONDS Maximum time to wait for initial connection to be established.
--winrm-basic-auth-only Perform only Basic Authentication to the target WinRM node.
--connection-protocol PROTOCOL Connection protocol to use. Valid values are 'winrm' and 'ssh'. Default is 'ssh'.
--connection-user User to authenticate as, regardless of protocol.
--connection-password Password to authenticate as, regardless of protocol.
--connection-port Port to connect to, regardless of protocol.
--ssh-verify-host-key VALUE Verify host key. Default is 'always'. Valid values are 'accept', 'accept_new', 'accept_new_or_local_tunnel', and 'never'.

Changed Flags

Flag New Option Notes
--[no-]host-key-verify --ssh-verify-host-key VALUE See above for valid values.
--forward-agent --ssh-forward-agent
--session-timeout MINUTES --session-timeout SECONDS New for ssh, existing for winrm. The unit has changed from MINUTES to SECONDS for consistency with other timeouts.
--ssh-password --connection-password
--ssh-port --connection-port knife[:ssh_port] config setting remains available.
--ssh-user --connection-user knife[:ssh_user] config setting remains available.
--ssl-peer-fingerprint --winrm-ssl-peer-fingerprint
--prerelease --channel CHANNEL This now allows you to specify the channel that Chef Infra Client gets installed from. Valid values are stable, current, and unstable. 'current' has the same effect as using the old --prerelease.
--winrm-authentication-protocol=PROTO --winrm-auth-method=AUTH-METHOD Valid values: plaintext, kerberos, ssl, negotiate
--winrm-password --connection-password
--winrm-port --connection-port knife[:winrm_port] config setting remains available.
--winrm-ssl-verify-mode MODE --winrm-no-verify-cert Mode is not accepted. When flag is present, SSL cert will not be verified. Same as original mode of 'verify_none'. [1]
--winrm-transport TRANSPORT --winrm-ssl Use this flag if the target host is accepts WinRM connections over SSL. [1]
--winrm-user --connection-user knife[:winrm_user] config setting remains available.
--winrm-session-timeout --session-timeout Now available for bootstrapping over SSH as well

[1] These flags do not have an automatic mapping of old flag -> new flag. The new flag must be used.

Removed Flags

Flag Notes
--kerberos-keytab-file This option existed but was not implemented.
--winrm-codepage This was used under knife-windows because bootstrapping was performed over a cmd shell. It is now invoked from powershell, so this option is no longer used.
--winrm-shell This option was ignored for bootstrap.
--install-as-service Installing Chef Client as a service is not supported.

Usage Changes

Instead of specifying protocol with -o, it is also possible to prefix the target hostname with the protocol in URL format. For example:

  knife bootstrap example.com -o ssh
  knife bootstrap ssh://example.com
  knife bootstrap example.com -o winrm
  knife bootstrap winrm://example.com

Chef Infra Client packages remove /opt/chef before installation

Upon upgrading Chef Infra Client packages, the /opt/chef directory is removed. This ensures any chef_gem installed gem versions and other modifications to /opt/chef will removed to prevent upgrade issues. Due to technical details with rpm script execution order, the implementation involves a a pre-installation script that wipes /opt/chef before every install, and is done consistently this way on every package manager.

Users who are properly managing customizations to /opt/chef through Chef recipes would not be affected, because their customizations will still be installed by the new package.

You will see a warning that the /opt/chef directory will be removed during the package installation process.

powershell_script now allows overriding the default flags

We now append powershell_script user flags to the default flags rather than the other way around, which made user flags override the defaults. This is the correct behavior, but it may cause scripts to execute differently than in previous Chef Client releases.

Package provider allow_downgrade is now true by default

We reversed the default behavior to allow_downgrade true for our package providers. To override this setting to prevent downgrades, use the allow_downgrade false flag. This behavior change will mostly affect users of the rpm and zypper package providers.

In this example, the code below should now read as asserting that the package foo must be version 1.2.3 after that resource is run.:

package "foo" do
  version "1.2.3"
end

The code below is now what is necessary to specify that foo must be version 1.2.3 or higher. Note that the yum provider supports syntax like package "foo > 1.2.3", which should be used and is preferred over using allow_downgrade.

package "foo" do
  allow_downgrade false
  version "1.2.3"
end

Node Attributes deep merge nil values

Writing a nil to a precedence level in the node object now acts like any other value and can be used to override values back to nil.

For example:

chef (15.0.53)> node.default["foo"] = "bar"
 => "bar"
chef (15.0.53)> node.override["foo"] = nil
 => nil
chef (15.0.53)> node["foo"]
 => nil

In prior versions of chef-client, the nil set in the override level would be completely ignored and the value of node["foo"] would have been "bar".

http_disable_auth_on_redirect now enabled

The Chef config http_disable_auth_on_redirect has been changed from false to true. In Chef Infra Client 16, this config option will be removed altogether and Chef Infra Client will always disable auth on redirect.

knife cookbook test removal

The knife cookbook test command has been removed. This command would often report non-functional cookbooks as functional, and has been superseded by functionality in other testing tools such as cookstyle, foodcritic, and chefspec.

ohai resource's ohai_name property removal

The ohai resource contained a non-functional ohai_name property, which has been removed.

knife status --hide-healthy flag removal

The knife status --hide-healthy flag has been removed. Users should run knife status --hide-by-mins MINS instead.

Cookbook shadowing in Chef Solo Legacy Mode Removed

Previously, if a user provided multiple cookbook paths to Chef Solo that contained cookbooks with the same name, Chef Solo would combine these into a single cookbook. This merging of two cookbooks often caused unexpected outcomes and has been removed.

Removal of unused route resource properties

The route resource contained multiple unused properties that have been removed. If you previously set networking, networking_ipv6, hostname, domainname, or domain, they would be ignored. In Chef Infra Client 15, setting these properties will throw an error.

FreeBSD pkg provider removal

Support for the FreeBSD pkg package system in the freebsd_package resource has been removed. FreeBSD 10 replaced the pkg system with pkg-ng system, so this removal only impacts users of EOL FreeBSD releases.

require_recipe removal

The legacy require_recipe method in recipes has been removed. This method was replaced with include_recipe in Chef Client 10, and a FoodCritic rule has been warning to update cookbooks for multiple years.

Legacy shell_out methods removed

In Chef Client 14, many of the more obscure shell_out methods used in LWRPs and custom resources were combined into the standard shell_out and shell_out! methods. The legacy methods were infrequently used and Chef Client 14/Foodcritic both contained deprecation warnings for these methods. The following methods will now throw an error: shell_out_compact, shell_out_compact!, shell_out_compact_timeout, shell_out_compact_timeout!, shell_out_with_systems_locale, and shell_out_with_systems_locale!.

knife bootstrap --identity_file removal

The knife bootstrap --identity_file flag has been removed. This flag was deprecated in Chef Client 12, and users should now use the --ssh-identity-file flag instead.

knife user support for Chef Infra Server < 12 removed

The knife user command no longer supports the open source Chef Infra Server version prior to 12.

attributes in metadata.rb

Chef Infra Client no longer processes attributes in the metadata.rb file. Attributes could be defined in the metadata.rb file as a form of documentation, which would be shown when running knife cookbook show COOKBOOK_NAME. Often, these attribute definitions would become out of sync with the attributes in the actual attributes files. Chef Infra Client 15 will no longer show these attributes when running knife cookbook show COOKBOOK_NAME and will instead throw a warning message upon upload. Foodcritic has warned against the use of attributes in the metadata.rb file since April 2017.

Node attributes array bugfix

Chef Infra Client 15 includes a bugfix for incorrect node attribute behavior involving a rare usage of arrays, which may impact users who depend on the incorrect behavior.

Previously, you could set an attribute like this:

node.default["foo"] = []
node.default["foo"] << { "bar" => "baz }

This would result in a Hash, instead of a VividMash, inserted into the AttrArray, so that:

node.default["foo"][0]["bar"] # gives the correct result
node.default["foo"][0][:bar]  # does not work due to the sub-Hash not
                              # converting keys

The new behavior uses a Mash so that the attributes will work as expected.

Ohai's system_profile plugin for macOS removed

We removed the system_profile plugin because it incorrectly returned data on modern macOS systems. If you relied on this plugin, you'll want to update recipes to use node['hardware'] instead, which correctly returns the same data, but in a more easily consumed format. Removing this plugin speeds up Ohai and Chef Infra Client by ~3 seconds, and dramatically reduces the size of the node object on the Chef Infra Server.

Ohai's Ohai::Util::Win32::GroupHelper class has been removed

We removed the Ohai::Util::Win32::GroupHelper helper class from Ohai. This class was intended for use internally in several Windows plugins, but it was never marked private in the codebase. If any of your Ohai plugins rely on this helper class, you will need to update your plugins for Ohai 15.

Audit Mode

Chef Client's Audit mode was introduced in 2015 as a beta that needed to be enabled via client.rb. Its functionality has been superseded by Chef InSpec and has been removed.

Ohai system_profiler plugin removal

The system_profiler plugin, which ran on macOS systems, has been removed. This plugin took longer to run than all other plugins on macOS combined, and no longer produced usable information on modern macOS releases. If you're looking for similar information, it can now be found in the hardware plugin.

Ohai::Util::Win32::GroupHelper helper removal

The deprecated Ohai::Util::Win32::GroupHelper helper has been removed from Ohai. Any custom Ohai plugins using this helper will need to be updated.

Ohai::System.refresh_plugins method removal

The refresh_plugins method in the Ohai::System class has been removed as it has been unused for multiple major Ohai releases. If you are programatically using Ohai in your own Ruby application, you will need to update your code to use the load_plugins method instead.

Ohai Microsoft VirtualPC / VirtualServer detection removal

The Virtualization plugin will no longer detect systems running on the circa ~2005 VirtualPC or VirtualServer hypervisors. These hypervisors were long ago deprecated by Microsoft and support can no longer be tested.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.15

Updated Resources

ifconfig

The ifconfig resource has been updated to properly support interfaces with a hyphen in their name. This is most commonly encountered with bridge interfaces that are named br-1234. Additionally, the ifconfig resource now supports the latest ifconfig binaries found in OS releases such as Debian 10.

windows_task

The windows_task resource now supports the Start When Available option with a new start_when_available property. Issues that prevented the resource from being idempotent on Windows 2016 and 2019 hosts have also been resolved.

Platform Support

New Platforms

Chef Infra Client is now tested against the following platforms with packages available on downloads.chef.io:

  • Ubuntu 20.04
  • Ubuntu 18.04 aarch64
  • Debian 10

Retired Platforms

  • Chef Infra Clients packages are no longer produced for Windows 2008 R2 as this release reached its end of life on Jan 14th, 2020.
  • Chef Infra Client packages are no longer produced for RHEL 6 on the s390x platform.

Security Updates

OpenSSL

OpenSSL has been updated to 1.0.2u to resolve CVE-2019-1551

Ruby

Ruby has been updated from 2.5.7 to 2.5.8 to resolve the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2020-16255: Unsafe Object Creation Vulnerability in JSON (Additional fix)
  • CVE-2020-10933: Heap exposure vulnerability in the socket library

Chef Client Release Notes 14.14.29

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an error with the service and systemd_unit resources which would try to re-enable services with an indirect status.
  • The systemd_unit resource now logs at the info level.
  • Fixed knife config when it returned a TypeError: no implicit conversion of nil into String error.

Security Updates

libxslt

libxslt has been updated to 1.1.34 to resolve CVE-2019-13118.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.14.25

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved a regression introduced in Chef Infra Client 14.14.14 that broke installation of gems in some scenarios
  • Fixed Habitat packaging of chef-client artifacts
  • Fixed crash in knife when displaying a missing profile error message
  • Fixed knife subcommand --help not working as intended for some commands
  • Fixed knife ssh interactive mode exit error
  • Fixed for :day`` option not accepting integer value in the windows_task` resource
  • Fixed for user resource not handling a GID if it is specified as a string
  • Fixed the ifconfig resource to support interfaces with a - in the name

Chef Client Release Notes 14.14

Platform Updates

Newly Supported Platforms

The following platforms are now packaged and tested for Chef Infra Client:

  • Red Hat 8
  • FreeBSD 12
  • macOS 10.15
  • Windows 2019
  • AIX 7.2

Deprecated Platforms

The following platforms have reached EOL status and are no longer packaged or tested for Chef Infra Client:

  • FreeBSD 10
  • macOS 10.12
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11
  • Ubuntu 14.04

See Chef's Platform End-of-Life Policy for more information on when Chef ends support for an OS release.

Updated Resources

dnf_package

The dnf_package resource has been updated to fully support RHEL 8.

zypper_package

The zypper_package resource has been updated to properly update packages when using the :upgrade action.

remote_file

The remote_file resource now properly shows download progress when the show_progress property is set to true.

Improvements

Custom Resource Unified Mode

Chef Infra Client 14.14 introduces an exciting new way to easily write custom resources that mix built-in Chef Infra resources with Ruby code. Previously, custom resources would use Chef Infra's standard compile and converge phases, which meant that Ruby would be evaluated first and then the resources would be converged. This often results in confusing and undesirable behavior when you are trying to mix resources with Ruby logic. Many custom resource authors would attempt to get around this by forcing resources to run at compile time so that all the code in their resource would execute during the compile phase.

An example of forcing a resource to run at compile time:

resource_name 'foo' do
  action :nothing
end.run_action(:some_action)

With unified mode, you opt in to a single phase per resource where all Ruby and Chef Infra resources are executed at once. This makes it far easier to determine how your code will be evaluated and run. Additionally, you no longer need to force any resources to run at compile time, as all code is run in the compile phase. To enable this new mode just add unified_mode true to your resources like this:

property :Some_property, String

unified_mode true

action :create do
  # some code
end

New Options for installing Ruby Gems From metadata.rb

Chef Infra Client allows gems to be specified in the cookbook metadata.rb, which can be problematic in some environments. When a cookbook is running in an airgapped environment, Chef Infra Client attempts to connect to rubygems.org even if the gem is already on the system. There are now two additional configuration options that can be set in your client.rb config: - gem_installer_bundler_options: This allows setting additional bundler options for the install such as --local to install from local cache. Example: ["--local", "--clean"]. - skip_gem_metadata_installation: If set to true skip gem metadata installation if all gems are already installed.

SLES / openSUSE 15 detection

Ohai now properly detects SLES and openSUSE 15.x. Thanks for this fix @balasankarc.

Performance Improvements

We have improved the performance of Chef Infra Client by resolving bundler errors in our packaging.

Bootstrapping Chef Infra Client 15 will no fail

Knife now fails with a descriptive error message when attempting to bootstrap nodes with Chef Infra Client 15. You will need to bootstrap these nodes using Knife from Chef Infra Client 15.x. We recommend performing this bootstrap from Chef Workstation, which includes the Knife CLI in addition to other useful tools for managing your infrastructure with Chef Infra.

Security Updates

Ruby

Ruby has been updated from 2.5.5 to 2.5.7 in order to resolve the following CVEs:

openssl

openssl has been updated from 1.0.2s to 1.0.2t in order to resolve CVE-2019-1563 and CVE-2019-1547.

nokogiri

nokogori has been updated from 1.10.2 to 1.10.4 in order to resolve CVE-2019-5477.

Chef Infra Client Release Notes 14.13:

Updated Resources

directory

The directory has been updated to properly set the deny_rights permission on Windows. Thanks @merlinjim for reporting this issue.

service

The service resource is now idempotent on SLES 11 systems. Thanks @gsingla294 for reporting this issue.

cron

The cron resource has been updated to advise users to use the specify properties rather than passing values in as part of the environment property. This avoids a situation where a user could pass the differing values in both locations and receive unexpected results.

link

The link resource includes improved logging upon failure to help you debug what has failed. Thanks @jaymzh for this improvement.

template

The template resource now includes additional information when templating failures, which is particularly useful in ChefSpec. Thanks @brodock for this improvement.

delete_resource Fix

The delete_resource helper now works properly when the resource you are attempting to delete has multiple providers. Thanks @artem-sidorenko for this fix.

Helpers Help Everywhere

Various helpers have been moved into Chef Infra Client's universal class, which makes them available anywhere in your cookbook, not just recipes. If you've ever been confused why something like search, powershell_out, or data_bag_item didn't work somewhere in your code, that should be resolved now.

Deprecations

The CHEF-25 deprecation for resource collisions between cookbooks and resources in Chef Infra Client has been removed. Instead you will see a log warning that a collision has occurred, which advises you to update your run_list or cookbooks.

Updated Components

  • openssl 1.0.2r -> 1.0.2s (bugfix only release)
  • cacerts 2019-01-23 -> 2019-05-15

Chef Client Release Notes 14.12.9:

License Acceptance Placeholder Flag

In preparation for Chef Infra Client 15.0 we've added a placeholder --chef-license flag to the chef-client command. This allows you to use the new --chef-license flag on both Chef Infra Client 14.12.9+ and 15+ notes without producing errors on Chef Infra Client 14.

Important Bug Fixes

  • Blacklisting and whiteliting default and override level attributes is once again possible.
  • You may now encrypt a previously unencrypted data bag.
  • Resolved a regression introduced in Chef Infra Client 14.12.3 that resulted in errors when managing Windows services

Chef Infra Client Release Notes 14.12.3:

Updated Resources

windows_service

The windows_service resource no longer resets credentials on a service when using the :start action without the :configure action. Thanks @jasonwbarnett for fixing this.

windows_certificate

The windows_certificate resource now imports nested certificates while importing P7B certs.

Updated Components

  • nokogiri 1.10.1 -> 1.10.2
  • ruby 2.5.3 -> 2.5.5
  • InSpec 3.7.1 -> 3.9.0
  • The unused windows-api gem is no longer bundled with Chef on Windows hosts

Chef Infra Client Release Notes 14.11:

Updated Resources

chocolatey_package

The chocolatey_package resource now uses the provided options to fetch information on available packages, which allows installation packages from private sources. Thanks @astoltz for reporting this issue.

openssl_dhparam

The openssl_dhparam resource now supports updating the dhparam file's mode on subsequent chef-client runs. Thanks @anewb for the initial work on this fix.

mount

The mount resource now properly adds a blank line between entries in fstab to prevent mount failures on AIX.

windows_certificate

The windows_certificate resource now supports importing Base64 encoded CER certificates and nested P7B certificates. Additionally, private keys in PFX certificates are now imported along with the certificate.

windows_share

The windows_share resource has improved logic to compare the desired share path vs. the current path, which prevents the resource from incorrectly converging during each Chef run. Thanks @Xorima for this fix.

windows_task

The windows_task resource now properly clears out arguments that are no longer present when updating a task. Thanks @nmcspadden for reporting this.

InSpec 3.7.1

InSpec has been updated from 3.4.1 to 3.7.1. This new release contains improvements to the plugin system, a new config file system, and improvements to multiple resources. Additionally, profile attributes have also been renamed to inputs to prevent confusion with Chef attributes, which weren't actually related in any way.

Updated Components

  • bundler 1.16.1 -> 1.17.3
  • libxml2 2.9.7 -> 2.9.9
  • ca-certs updated to 2019-01-22 for new roots

Security Updates

OpenSSL

OpenSSL has been updated to 1.0.2r in order to resolve CVE-2019-1559

RubyGems

RubyGems has been updated to 2.7.9 in order to resolve the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2019-8320: Delete directory using symlink when decompressing tar
  • CVE-2019-8321: Escape sequence injection vulnerability in verbose
  • CVE-2019-8322: Escape sequence injection vulnerability in gem owner
  • CVE-2019-8323: Escape sequence injection vulnerability in API response handling
  • CVE-2019-8324: Installing a malicious gem may lead to arbitrary code execution
  • CVE-2019-8325: Escape sequence injection vulnerability in errors

Chef Client Release Notes 14.10:

Updated Resources

windows_certificate

The windows_certificate resource is now fully idempotent and properly imports private keys. Thanks @Xorima for reporting these issues.

apt_repository

The apt_repository resource no longer creates .gpg directory in the user's home directory owned by root when installing repository keys. Thanks @omry for reporting this issue.

git

The git resource no longer displays the URL of the repository if the sensitive property is set.

InSpec 3.4.1

InSpec has been updated from 3.2.6 to 3.4.1. This new release adds new aws_billing_report / aws_billing_reports resources, resolves multiple bugs, and includes tons of under the hood improvements.

New Deprecations

knife cookbook site

Since Chef 13, knife cookbook site has actually called the knife supermarket command under the hood. In Chef 16 (April 2020), we will remove the knife cookbook site command in favor of knife supermarket.

Audit Mode

Chef's Audit mode was introduced in 2015 as a beta that needed to be enabled via client.rb. Its functionality has been superceded by InSpec and we will be removing this beta feature in Chef Infra Client 15 (April 2019).

Cookbook Shadowing

Cookbook shadowing was deprecated in 0.10 and will be removed in Chef Infra Client 15 (April 2019). Cookbook shadowing allowed combining cookbooks within a mono-repo, so long as the cookbooks in question had the same name and were present in both the cookbooks directory and the site-cookbooks directory.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.9:

Updated Resources

group

On Windows hosts, the group resource now supports setting the comment field via a new comment property.

homebrew_cask

Two issues, which caused homebrew_cask to converge on each Chef run, have been resolved. Thanks @jeroenj for this fix. Additionally, the resource will no longer fail if the cask_name property is specified.

homebrew_tap

The homebrew_tap resource no longer fails if the tap_name property is specified.

openssl_x509_request

The openssl_x509_request resource now properly writes out the CSR file if the path property is specified. Thank you @cpjones for reporting this issue.

powershell_package_source

powershell_package_source now suppresses warnings, which prevented properly loading the resource state, and resolves idempotency issues when both the name and source_name properties were specified. Thanks @Happycoil for this fix.

sysctl

The sysctl resource now allows slashes in the key or block name. This allows keys such as net/ipv4/conf/ens256.401/rp_filter to be used with this resource.

windows_ad_join

Errors joining the domain are now properly suppressed from the console and logs if the sensitive property is set to true. Thanks @Happycoil for this improvement.

windows_certificate

The delete action now longer fails if a certificate does not exist on the system. Additionally, certificates with special characters in their passwords will no longer fail. Thank you for reporting this @chadmccune.

windows_printer

The windows_printer resource no longer fails when creating or deleting a printer if the device_id property is specified.

windows_task

Non-system users can now run tasks without a password being specified.

Minimal Ohai Improvements

The ohai init_package plugin is now included as part of the minimal_ohai plugins set, which allows resources such as timezone to continue to function if Chef is running with the minimal number of ohai plugins.

Ruby 2.6 Support

Chef 14.9 now supports Ruby 2.6.

InSpec 3.2.6

InSpec has been updated from 3.0.64 to 3.2.6 with improved resources for auditing. See the InSpec changelog for additional details on this new version.

powershell_exec Runtimes Bundled

The necessary VC++ runtimes for the powershell_exec helper are now bundled with Chef to prevent failures on hosts that lacked the runtimes.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.8:

Updated Resources

apt_package

The apt_package resource now supports using the allow_downgrade property to enable downgrading of packages on a node in order to meet a specified version. Thank you @whiteley for requesting this enhancement.

apt_repository

An issue was resolved in the apt_repository resource that caused the resource to fail when importing GPG keys on newer Debian releases. Thank you @EugenMayer for this fix.

dnf_package / yum_package

Initial support has been added for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Thank you @pixdrift for this fix.

gem_package

gem_package now supports installing gems into Ruby 2.6 or later installations.

windows_ad_join

windows_ad_join now uses the UPN format for usernames, which prevents some failures authenticating to the domain.

windows_certificate

An issue was resolved in the :acl_add action of the windows_certificate resource, which caused the resource to fail. Thank you @shoekstra for reporting this issue.

windows_feature

The windows_feature resource now allows for the installation of DISM features that have been fully removed from a system. Thank you @zanecodes for requesting this enhancement.

windows_share

Multiple issues were resolved in windows_share, which caused the resource to either fail or update the share state on every Chef Client run. Thank you @chadmccune for reporting several of these issues and @derekgroh for one of the fixes.

windows_task

A regression was resolved that prevented ChefSpec from testing the windows_task resource in Chef Client 14.7. Thank you @jjustice6 for reporting this issue.

Ohai 14.8

Improved Virtualization Detection

Hyper-V Hypervisor Detection

Detection of Linux guests running on Hyper-V has been improved. In addition, Linux guests on Hyper-V hypervisors will also now detect their hypervisor's hostname. Thank you @safematix for contributing this enhancement.

Example node['virtualization'] data:

{
  "systems": {
    "hyperv": "guest"
  },
  "system": "hyperv",
  "role": "guest",
  "hypervisor_host": "hyper_v.example.com"
}

LXC / LXD Detection

On Linux systems running lxc or lxd containers, the lxc/lxd virtualization system will now properly populate the node['virtualization']['systems'] attribute.

BSD Hypervisor Detection

BSD-based systems can now detect guests running on KVM and Amazon's hypervisor without the need for the dmidecode package.

New Platform Support

  • Ohai now properly detects the openSUSE 15.X platform. Thank you @megamorf for reporting this issue.
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop now identified as platform_family 'suse'
  • XCP-NG is now identified as platform 'xcp' and platform_family 'rhel'. Thank you @heyjodom for submitting this enhancement.
  • Mangeia Linux is now identified as platform 'mangeia' and platform_family 'mandriva'
  • Antergos Linux now identified as platform_family 'arch'
  • Manjaro Linux now identified as platform_family 'arch'

Security Updates

OpenSSL

OpenSSL has been updated to 1.0.2q in order to resolve:

  • Microarchitecture timing vulnerability in ECC scalar multiplication (CVE-2018-5407)
  • Timing vulnerability in DSA signature generation (CVE-2018-0734)

Chef Client Release Notes 14.7:

New Resources

windows_firewall_rule

Use the windows_firewall_rule resource create or delete Windows Firewall rules.

See the windows_firewall_rule documentation for more information.

Thank you Schuberg Philis for transferring us the windows_firewall cookbook and to @Happycoil for porting it to chef-client with a significant refactoring.

windows_share

Use the windows_share resource create or delete Windows file shares.

See the windows_share documentation for more information.

windows_certificate

Use the windows_certificate resource add, remove, or verify certificates in the system or user certificate stores.

See the windows_certificate documentation for more information.

Updated Resources

dmg_package

The dmg_package resource has been refactored to improve idempotency and properly support accepting a DMG's EULA with the accept_eula property.

kernel_module

Kernel_module now only runs the initramfs update once per Chef run to greatly speed up chef-client runs when multiple kernel_module resources are used. Thank you @tomdoherty for this improvement.

mount

The supports property once again allows passing supports data as an array. This matches the behavior present in Chef 12.

timezone

macOS support has been added to the timezone resource.

windows_task

A regression in Chef 14.6's windows_task resource which resulted in tasks being created with the "Run only when user is logged on" option being set when created with a specific user other than SYSTEM, has been resolved.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.6:

Smaller Package and Install Size

Both Chef packages and on disk installations have been greatly reduced in size by trimming unnecessary installation files. This has reduced our package size on macOS/Linux by ~50% and Windows by ~12%. With this change Chef 14 is now smaller than a legacy Chef 10 package.

New Resources

Timezone

Chef now includes the timezone resource from @dragonsmith's timezone_lwrp cookbook. This resource supports setting a Linux node's timezone. Thank you @dragonsmith for allowing us to include this out of the box in Chef.

Example:

timezone 'UTC'

Updated Resources

windows_task

The windows_task resource has been updated to support localized system users and groups on non-English nodes. Thanks @jugatsu for making this possible.

user

The user resource now includes a new full_name property for Windows hosts, which allows specifying a user's full name.

Example:

  user 'jdoe' do
    full_name 'John Doe'
  end

zypper_package

The zypper_package resource now includes a new global_options property. This property can be used to specify one or more options for the zypper command line that are global in context.

Example:

package 'sssd' do
   global_options '-D /tmp/repos.d/'
end

InSpec 3.0

Inspec has been updated to version 3.0 with addition resources, exception handling, and a new plugin system. See https://blog.chef.io/2018/10/16/announcing-inspec-3-0/ for details.

macOS Mojave (10.14)

Chef is now tested against macOS Mojave, and packages are now available at downloads.chef.io.

Important Bugfixes

  • Multiple bugfixes in Chef Vault have been resolved by updating chef-vault to 3.4.2
  • Invalid yum package names now gracefully fail
  • windows_ad_join now properly executes. Thank you @cpjones01 for reporting this.
  • rhsm_errata_level now properly executes. Thank you @freakinhippie for this fix.
  • registry_key now properly writes out the correct value when sensitive is specified. Thank you @josh-barker for this fix.
  • locale now properly executes on RHEL 6 and Amazon Linux 201X.

Ohai 14.6

Filesystem Plugin on AIX and Solaris

AIX and Solaris now ship with a filesystem2 plugin that updates the filesystem data to match that of Linux, macOS, and BSD hosts. This new data structure makes accessing filesystem data in recipes easier and especially improves the layout and depth of data on ZFS filesystems. In Chef Infra Client 15 (April 2019) we will begin writing this same format of data to the existing node['filesystem'] namespace. In Chef 16 (April 2020) we will remove the node['filesystem2'] namespace, completing the transition to the new format. Thank you @jaymzh for continuing the updates to our filesystem plugins with this change.

macOS Improvements

The system_profile plugin has been improved to skip over unnecessary data, which reduces macOS node sizes on the Chef Server. Additionally the CPU plugin has been updated to limit what sysctl values it polls, which prevents hanging on some system configurations.

SLES 15 Detection

SLES 15 is now correctly detected as the platform "suse" instead of "sles". This matches the behavior of SLES 11 and 12 hosts.

New Deprecations

system_profile Ohai plugin removal

The system_profile plugin will be removed from Chef/Ohai 15 in April 2019. This plugin does not correctly return data on modern Mac systems. Additionally the same data is provided by the hardware plugin, which has a format that is simpler to consume. Removing this plugin will reduce Ohai return by ~3 seconds and greatly reduce the size of the node object on the Chef server.

Security Updates

Ruby 2.5.3

Ruby has been updated to from 2.5.1 to 2.5.3 to resolve multiple CVEs and bugs:

Chef Client Release Notes 14.5.33:

This release resolves a regression that caused the windows_ad_join resource to fail to run. It also makes the following additional fixes:

  • The ohai resource's unused ohai_name property has been deprecated. This will be removed in Chef Infra Client 15.0.
  • Error messages in the windows_feature resources have been improved.
  • The windows_service resource will no longer log potentially sensitive information if the sensitive property is used.

Thanks to @cpjones01, @kitforbes, and @dgreeninger for their help with this release.

Chef Client Release Notes 14.5.27:

New Resources

We've added new resources to Chef 14.5. Cookbooks using these resources will continue to take precedent until the Chef Infra Client 15.0 release

windows_workgroup

Use the windows_workgroup resource to join or change a Windows host workgroup.

See the windows_workgroup documentation for more information.

Thanks @derekgroh for contributing this new resource.

locale

Use the locale resource to set the system's locale.

See the locale documentation for more information.

Thanks @vincentaubert for contributing this new resource.

Updated Resources

windows_ad_join

windows_ad_join now includes a new_hostname property for setting the hostname for the node upon joining the domain.

Thanks @derekgroh for contributing this new property.

InSpec 2.2.102

InSpec has been updated from 2.2.70 to 2.2.102. This new version includes the following improvements:

  • Support for using ERB templating within the .yml files
  • HTTP basic auth support for fetching dependent profiles
  • A new global attributes concept
  • Better error handling with Automate reporting
  • Vendor command now vendors profiles when using path://

Ohai 14.5

Windows Improvements

Detection for the root_group attribute on Windows has been simplified and improved to properly support non-English systems. With this change, we've also deprecated the Ohai::Util::Win32::GroupHelper helper, which is no longer necessary. Thanks to @jugatsu for putting this together.

We've also added a new encryption_status attribute to volumes on Windows. Thanks to @kmf for suggesting this new feature.

Configuration Improvements

The timeout period for communicating with OpenStack metadata servers can now be configured with the openstack_metadata_timeout config option. Thanks to @sawanoboly for this improvement.

Ohai now properly handles relative paths to config files when running on the command line. This means commands like ohai -c ../client.rb will now properly use your config values.

Security updates

Rubyzip

The rubyzip gem has been updated to 1.2.2 to resolve CVE-2018-1000544

Chef Client Release Notes 14.4:

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 displays the active profile.

knife config use-profile PROFILE sets the workstation-level default profile. You can still override this setting with the --profile command line option or the $CHEF_PROFILE environment variable.

knife config list-profiles displays 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

Thank you @coderanger for this contribution.

New Resources

The following new previous resources were added to Chef 14.4. Cookbooks with the same resources will continue to take precedent until the Chef Infra Client 15.0 release

Cron_d

Use the cron_d resource to manage cron definitions in /etc/cron.d. This is similar to the cron resource, but it does not use the monolithic /etc/crontab. file.

Cron_access

Use the cron_access resource to manage the /etc/cron.allow and /etc/cron.deny files. This resource previously shipped in the cron community cookbook and has fully backwards compatibility with the previous cron_manage definition in that cookbook.

openssl_x509_certificate

Use the openssl_x509_certificate resource to generate signed or self-signed, PEM-formatted x509 certificates. If no existing key is specified, the resource automatically generates a passwordless key with the certificate. If a CA private key and certificate are provided, the certificate will be signed with them. This resource previously shipped in the openssl cookbook as openssl_x509 and is fully backwards compatible with the legacy resource name.

Thank you @juju482 for updating this resource!

openssl_x509_request

Use the openssl_x509_request resource to generate PEM-formatted x509 certificates requests. If no existing key is specified, the resource automatically generates a passwordless key with the certificate.

Thank you @juju482 for contributing this resource.

openssl_x509_crl

Use the openssl_x509_crll resource to generate PEM-formatted x509 certificate revocation list (CRL) files.

Thank you @juju482 for contributing this resource.

openssl_ec_private_key

Use the openssl_ec_private_key resource to generate ec private key files. If a valid ec key file can be opened at the specified location, no new file will be created.

Thank you @juju482 for contributing this resource.

openssl_ec_public_key

Use the openssl_ec_public_key resource to generate ec public key files given a private key.

Thank you @juju482 for contributing this resource.

Resource improvements

windows_package

The windows_package resource now supports setting the sensitive property to avoid showing errors if a package install fails.

sysctl

The sysctl resource will now update the on-disk systctl.d file even if the current sysctl value matches the desired value.

windows_task

The windows_task resource now supports setting the task priority of the scheduled task with a new priority property. Additionally windows_task now supports managing the behavior of task execution when a system is on battery using new disallow_start_if_on_batteries and stop_if_going_on_batteries properties.

ifconfig

The ifconfig resource now supports setting the interface's VLAN via a new vlan property on RHEL platform_family and setting the interface's gateway via a new gateway property on RHEL/Debian platform_family.

Thank you @tomdoherty for this contribution.

route

The route resource now supports additional RHEL platform_family systems as well as Amazon Linux.

systemd_unit

The systemd_unit resource now supports specifying options multiple times in the content hash. Instead of setting the value to a string you can now set it to an array of strings.

Thank you @dbresson for this contribution.

Security Updates

OpenSSL

OpenSSL updated to 1.0.2p to resolve:

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 Infra Client 15.

See CHEF-26 Deprecation Page for details.

Legacy FreeBSD pkg provider

Chef Infra Client 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 14.1.1:

  • 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 or remove 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.

windows_workgroup

Use the windows_workgroup resource to join a Windows Workgroup and reboot the node. This resource is based on the windows_ad_join resource.

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 13.12.14

Bugfixes

  • The mount provider now properly adds blank lines between fstab entries on AIX
  • Ohai now reports itself as Ohai well communicating with GCE metadata endpoints
  • Property deprecations in custom resources no longer result in an error. Thanks for reporting this martinisoft
  • mixlib-archive has been updated to prevent corruption of archives on Windows systems

Updated Components

  • libxml2 2.9.7 -> 2.9.9
  • ca-certs updated to 2019-01-22 for new roots
  • nokogiri 1.8.5 -> 1.10.1

Security Updates

OpenSSL

OpenSSL has been updated to 1.0.2r in order to resolve CVE-2019-1559 and CVE-2018-5407

RubyGems

RubyGems has been updated to 2.7.9 in order to resolve the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2019-8320: Delete directory using symlink when decompressing tar
  • CVE-2019-8321: Escape sequence injection vulnerability in verbose
  • CVE-2019-8322: Escape sequence injection vulnerability in gem owner
  • CVE-2019-8323: Escape sequence injection vulnerability in API response handling
  • CVE-2019-8324: Installing a malicious gem may lead to arbitrary code execution
  • CVE-2019-8325: Escape sequence injection vulnerability in errors

Chef Client Release Notes 13.12.3

Smaller Package and Install Size

We trimmed unnecessary installation files, greatly reducing the sizes of both Chef packages and on disk installations. MacOS/Linux/FreeBSD packages are ~50% smaller and Windows are ~12% smaller. Chef 13 is now smaller than a legacy Chef 10 package.

macOS Mojave (10.14)

Chef is now tested against macOS Mojave and packages are now available at downloads.chef.io.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

  • Ohai now properly detects SLES 15
  • The Chef package will no longer remove symlinks to chef-client and ohai when upgrading on SLES 15

Updated Chef-Vault

Updating chef-vault to 3.4.2 resolved multiple bugs.

Faster Windows Installations

Improved Windows installation speed by skipping unnecessary steps when Windows Installer 5.0 or later is available.

Ohai Release Notes 13.12

macOS Improvements

  • sysctl commands have been modified to gather only the bare minimum required data, which prevents sysctl hanging in some scenarios
  • Extra data has been removed from the system_profile plugin, reducing the amount of data stored on the chef-server for each node

New Deprecations

system_profile Ohai plugin removal

The system_profile plugin will be removed from Chef/Ohai 15 in April, 2019. This plugin incorrectly returns data on modern Mac systems. Further, the hardware plugin returns the same data in a more readily consumable format. Removing this plugin reduces the speed of the Ohai return by ~3 seconds and also greatly reduces the node object size on the Chef server

ohai_name property in ohai resource

The ohai resource's unused ohai_name property has been deprecated. This will be removed in Chef Infra Client 15.0.

Security Updates

Ruby 2.4.5

Ruby has been updated to from 2.4.4 to 2.4.5 to resolve multiple CVEs as well as bugs:

Chef Client Release Notes 13.11

Sensitive Properties on Windows

  • windows_service no longer logs potentially sensitive information when a service is setup
  • windows_package now respects the sensitive property to avoid logging sensitive data in the event of a package installation failure

Other Fixes

  • remote_directory now properly loads files in the root of a cookbook's files directory
  • osx_profile now uses the full path the profiles CLI tool to avoid running other binaries of the same name in a users path
  • package resources that don't support the allow_downgrade property will no longer fail
  • knife bootstrap windows error messages have been improved

Security Updates

OpenSSL

Rubyzip

Chef Client Release Notes 13.10

Bugfixes

  • Resolves a duplicate logging getting created when redirecting stdout
  • Using --recipe-url with a local file on Windows no longer fails
  • Service resource no longer throws Ruby deprecation warnings on Windows

Ohai 13.10 Improvements

  • Correctly identify the platform_version on the final release of Amazon Linux 2.0
  • Detect nodes with the DMI data of "OpenStack Compute" as being OpenStack nodes

Security Updates

ffi Gem

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

Chef Client Release Notes 13.9.X:

Security Updates

Ruby has been updated to 2.4.4

  • CVE-2017-17742: HTTP response splitting in WEBrick
  • CVE-2018-6914: Unintentional file and directory creation with directory traversal in tempfile and tmpdir
  • CVE-2018-8777: DoS by large request in WEBrick
  • CVE-2018-8778: Buffer under-read in String#unpack
  • CVE-2018-8779: Unintentional socket creation by poisoned NUL byte in UNIXServer and UNIXSocket
  • CVE-2018-8780: Unintentional directory traversal by poisoned NUL byte in Dir
  • Multiple vulnerabilities in RubyGems

Nokogiri has been updated to 1.8.2

  • [MRI] Behavior in libxml2 has been reverted which caused CVE-2018-8048 (loofah gem), CVE-2018-3740 (sanitize gem), and CVE-2018-3741 (rails-html-sanitizer gem).

OpenSSL has been updated to 1.0.2o

  • CVE-2018-0739: Constructed ASN.1 types with a recursive definition could exceed the stack.

Platform Updates

As Debian 7 is now end of life we will no longer produce Debian 7 chef-client packages.

Ifconfig on Ubuntu 18.04

Incompatibilities with Ubuntu 18.04 in the ifconfig resource have been resolved.

Ohai Updated to 13.9.2

Virtualization detection on AWS

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

Configurable DMI Whitelist

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

Filesystem2 on BSD

The Filesystem2 functionality has been backported to BSD systems to provide a consistent filesystem format.

Chef Client Release Notes 13.9.1:

Platform Additions

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

Chef Client Release Notes 13.9:

  • On Windows, the installer now correctly re-extracts files during repair mode
  • The mount resource will now not create duplicate entries when the device type differs
  • Ensure we don't request every remote file when running with lazy loading enabled
  • Don't crash when getting the access rights for Windows system accounts

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 13 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.'

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

Ohai Release Notes 13.9:

  • Fix uptime parsing on AIX
  • Fix Softlayer cloud detection
  • Use the current Azure metadata endpoint
  • Correctly detect macOS guests on VMware and VirtualBox

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 Infra Client 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 user@my.dns.domain.com 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

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

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

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.

Chef Client Release Notes 12.22:

Security Updates

Ruby

Ruby has been updated to 2.3.6 to resolve CVE-2017-17405

LibXML2

Libxml2 has been updated to 2.9.7 to resolve CVE-2017-15412

Ohai 8.26.1

EC2 detection on C5/M5

Ohai now provides EC2 metadata configuration information on the new C5/M5 instance types running on Amazon's new hypervisor.

LsPci Plugin

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

Docker Detection

The virtualization plugin has been updated to properly detect when running on Docker CE

Chef Client Release Notes 12.21:

Security Fixes

This release of Chef Client contains Ruby 2.3.5, fixing 4 CVEs:

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

It also contains a new version of Rubygems, fixing 4 CVEs:

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

This release also contains a new version of zlib, fixing 4 CVEs:

On Debian based systems, correctly prefer Systemd to Upstart

On Debian systems, packages that support systemd will often ship both an old style init script and a systemd unit file. When this happened, Chef would incorrectly choose Upstart rather than Systemd as the service provider. We now pick Systemd.

Handle the supports pseudo-property more gracefully

Chef 13 removed the supports property from core resources. However, many cookbooks also have a property named support, and Chef 12 was incorrectly giving a deprecation notice in that case, preventing users from properly testing their cookbooks for upgrades.

Don't crash when we downgrade from Chef 13 to Chef 12

On systems where Chef 13 had been run, Chef 12 would crash as the on disk cookbook format has changed. Chef 12 now correctly ignores the unexpected files.

Provide better system information when Chef crashes

When Chef crashes, the output now includes details about the platform and version of Chef that was running, so that a bug report has more detail from the off.

Chef Client Release Notes 12.19:

Highlighted enhancements for this release:

  • Systemd unit files are now verified before being installed.
  • Added support for windows alternate user identity in execute resources.
  • Added ed25519 key support for for ssh connections.

Windows alternate user identity execute support

The execute resource and similar resources such as script, batch, and powershell_script now support the specification of credentials on Windows so that the resulting process is created with the security identity that corresponds to those credentials.

Note: When Chef is running as a service, this feature requires that the user that Chef runs as has 'SeAssignPrimaryTokenPrivilege' (aka 'SE_ASSIGNPRIMARYTOKEN_NAME') user right. By default only LocalSystem and NetworkService have this right when running as a service. This is necessary even if the user is an Administrator.

This right bacn be added and checked in a recipe using this example:

# Add 'SeAssignPrimaryTokenPrivilege' for the user
Chef::ReservedNames::Win32::Security.add_account_right('<user>', 'SeAssignPrimaryTokenPrivilege')

# Check if the user has 'SeAssignPrimaryTokenPrivilege' rights
Chef::ReservedNames::Win32::Security.get_account_right('<user>').include?('SeAssignPrimaryTokenPrivilege')

Properties

The following properties are new or updated for the execute, script, batch, and powershell_script resources and any resources derived from them:

  • user
    Ruby types: String
    The user name of the user identity with which to launch the new process. Default value: nil. The user name may optionally be specified with a domain, i.e. domain\user or user@my.dns.domain.com 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 domain attribute. On Windows only, if this property is specified, the password property must be specified.

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

  • domain
    Ruby types String
    Windows only: The domain of the user user specified by the user property. Default value: nil. If not specified, the user name and password specified by the user and password properties will be used to resolve that user against the domain in which the system running Chef client is joined, or if that system is not joined to a domain it will resolve 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 user property.

Usage

The following examples explain how alternate user identity properties can be used in the execute resources:

powershell_script 'create powershell-test file' do
  code <<-EOH
  $stream = [System.IO.StreamWriter] "#{Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]}/powershell-test.txt"
  $stream.WriteLine("In #{Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]}...word.")
  $stream.close()
  EOH
  user 'username'
  password 'password'
end

execute 'mkdir test_dir' do
  cwd Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]
  domain "domain-name"
  user "user"
  password "password"
end

script 'create test_dir' do
  interpreter "bash"
  code  "mkdir test_dir"
  cwd Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]
  user "domain-name\\username"
  password "password"
end

batch 'create test_dir' do
  code "mkdir test_dir"
  cwd Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]
  user "username@domain-name"
  password "password"
end

Highlighted bug fixes for this release:

  • Ensure that the Windows Administrator group can access the chef-solo nodes directory
  • When loading a cookbook in Chef Solo, use metadata.json in preference to metadata.rb

Deprecation Notice

  • As of version 12.19, chef client will no longer be build or tested on the Cisco NX-OS and IOS XR platforms.

Ohai Release Notes 8.23:

Cumulus Linux Platform

Cumulus Linux will now be detected as platform cumulus instead of debian and the platform_version will be properly set to the Cumulus Linux release.

Virtualization Detection

Windows / Linux / BSD guests running on the Veertu hypervisors will now be detected

Windows guests running on Xen and Hyper-V hypervisors will now be detected

New Sysconf Plugin

A new plugin parses the output of the sysconf command to provide information on the underlying system.

AWS Account ID

The EC2 plugin now fetches the AWS Account ID in addition to previous instance metadata

GCC Detection

GCC detection has been improved to collect additional information, and to not prompt for the installation of Xcode on macOS systems

New deprecations introduced in this release:

Ohai::Config removed

sigar gem based plugins removed

run_command and popen4 helper methods removed

libvirt plugin attributes moved

Windows CPU plugin attribute changes

DigitalOcean plugin attribute changes