Chef: Debian 9 Support

As far as using chef-client to configure servers goes:

  • When is Chef support for Debian 9 (stretch), expected to be in place?

Per the Chef documentation, it looks like Debian 6, 7 as well as 8 are listed as secondary platforms for the chef-client. Is there any news as far as the expected time-frame for chef-client Debian 9 (stretch) support?

It seems with Linux’s LTS for Debian 9, now that Debian 9 (Stretch), is out, it makes sense in the long term for companies to be configuring / provisioning Debian 9 servers as oppose to 6, 7, and 8.

I am personally using Hosted Chef server as my Chef Server option, so Chef Server Debian 9 support is not as important to my specific use, however may help others who come across this thread. Please post any information anyone may have!

Did Debian 9 actually change the libc ABI? If not, I would presume that Debian 8 packages work fine.

The main issue I’m running into here is not being able to test my configuration using test-kitchen before applying them to an actual Debian 9 server (no Bento box available to test on). Seems like a ‘jump and hope for the best’, approach to use the Debian 8 stuff for Debian 9?

build your own box then? https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/boxes.html

@J0991 we’re actively testing our Chef Inc. managed cookbooks against Debian 9 now. We have a dokken image for testing with kitchen-dokken as well as a vagrant image debian-9.0 (9.1 is coming soon). You should have everything you need to test your cookbooks against Debian 9 and as far as we can tell everything works fine from a chef-client perspective.

-Tim

We’ve just released Debian 9.1 bento boxes and have already had existing Debian 9 ones prior.