Here’s this month’s round up of what happened in August across the Chef, Habitat, and InSpec open-source communities.
Chef
This month’s release of Chef Client 14.4 is the newest in the Chef 14 series, and includes seven new preview resources, many improvements to existing resources, and a brand new Knife profile management command. Chef Client 14.4 also includes OpenSSL 1.0.2p to resolve two vulnerabilities: CVE-2018-0732 and CVE-2018-0737.
In Chef Client 14.3 which we released last month, we introduced the concept of a preview resource. These resources are ready to use in production today, but because they were cleaned up and migrated from community cookbooks, conflict with them. They are marked as preview because the cookbook version will take precedence if that cookbook is found in your run list, and that behavior will persist until Chef 15, when only the version in core Chef will run.
This month’s new resources are cron_d, cron_access, openssl_x509_certificate, openssl_x509_request, openssl_x509_crl, openssl_ec_private_key and openssl_ec_public_key. Improved resources this month are sysctl, windows_task, ifconfig, route, and systemd_unit. You can read all about the new and improved resources in the release notes.
Finally, this month’s new feature is Knife configuration profiles. In the past, connecting to multiple Chef servers and switching between their configurations required the use of tools like knife-block or chefvm. No more! You can now set and use multiple configuration profiles using several profile-related subcommands to knife config. For more information, consult the documentation for Knife.
Habitat
We released Habitat 0.61.0 during the month of August. This is primarily a bugfix release, but is also laying the groundwork to support older Linux kernels as a result of the core plans rebuild from June. We made several improvements to supervisor operability as well.
Stuart Paterson also published a blog post on lift, shift and modernize of legacy applications in practice.
InSpec
We released InSpec several times during the month of August, introducing a few new resources including aws_ecs_cluster and iis_app_pool. We fixed some other bugs including one that precluded you from running certain InSpec commands like check, archive and json without being a privileged user.