Chef Infra Client 19.1.164 Released!

[cwolfe]

We are delighted to announce the availability of version 19.1.164 of Chef Infra Client.

Key features

• Chef Infra Client 19 is the long-term support (LTS) version.

• Chef Infra Client 19 is built entirely on Chef Habitat. We aren’t providing traditional Omnibus builds.

• Chef Infra Client 19 uses standard licensing for commercial, community, and trial customers.

• You can use Chef Infra Client Legacy Migration to upgrade nodes running Chef Infra Client 17 or 18 to Infra Client 19. This supports side-by-side installations of Chef Infra Client.

Improvements

• Added support for Ruby 3.4.8. #15542

• Added the oci? cloud helper so recipes and libraries can reliably determine whether a node is running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. #14902

• Improved remote cookbook file resolution by caching manifest segment lookups and providing clearer errors when a referenced segment is missing, reducing redundant manifest queries. #14705

• Improved the resource inspector so it now correctly reports more than one custom resource in a single cookbook resources/*.rb file, fixing cases where only one resource (or an incomplete set) was previously reported. #14546

• Improved performance by adding the any_children? method when looking up cookbook dependencies instead of enumerating and filtering the entire directory tree. This reduces filesystem traversal and speeds up uploads for large cookbooks. #15244

• Improved performance when looking up cookbook files, especially for large cookbooks. This makes cookbook file resolution more reliable and faster. #14829

• Improved performance when running recipes by reducing internal overhead in how resource properties are read and written. #15328

Agentless Mode

• This release improves Agentless Mode (previously called Target Mode). Agentless Mode lets you execute Chef Infra Client runs on nodes that don’t have the Infra Client installed on them and can work against nodes that only have SSH access.

• There are now 90+ built-in Infra Client resources that run in Agentless Mode.

• Added sudo capabilities to Agentless Mode. #15015

• Added support for retrieving HashiCorp Vault secrets in Agentless Mode. #15064

• Fixed an issue in Agentless Mode where required GUIDs were missing, which could cause errors or inconsistent behavior when running Infra Client against targets. This update ensures resources and targets are identified correctly during execution. #15467

• The yum_package resource now works correctly in Agentless Mode on Fedora and RHEL systems, and Chef handles file permission checks and temporary directory creation more robustly on remote targets. #14786

• Updated mixlib-shellout to fully support Agentless Mode. #14807

Compliance Phase

• Updated InSpec to version 7.0.

• Fixed handling of frozen_string_literals. #15363 #15580

• Fixed Compliance Phase reporting when quiet mode is set to true. This fixes an issue where the compliance report was being reported to standard output. #14779

Resource updates

• Removed the osx_profile resource. #15184 #15351

• The snap_package resource now supports full Snap channel identifiers (tracks/risk/branches), improving accuracy and flexibility when selecting versions to install or upgrade. #14950

• The apt_repository resource now has the signed_by property that manages repository keys and automatically adds signed-by= to the APT source entry, avoiding use of the deprecated apt-key global keyring. #14131

• The apt_repository resource now strips spaces from the repo_name property. #14470

• In the group resource, membership is now deduplicated when modifying a group. #14987

• Added the environment property to the apt_package, dnf_package, and yum_package resources. This allows you to pass a Hash of environment variables (for example, {"DEBIAN_FRONTEND" => "noninteractive"}) that will be set when Chef runs the underlying package manager commands. #14868

• The execute resource now has the cgroup property. This allows you to run commands within a specified cgroup on Linux. #14848

• Improved reliability when installing, upgrading, or querying packages with the dnf_package resource. #15059

Resource bug fixes

• In the apt_repository resource, we fixed an issue where the resource would overwrite the previous key in a keyring with an array of URLs. The resource now uses import instead of dearmor to import keys from URLs. This #15209

• In the apt_repository resource, we fixed an issue where the resource would generate an incorrect value of signed_by if you don’t set a value for either key or signed_by. #15207

• Fixed a bug where the apt_repository resource falsely returned true when creating a new keyring. #15008

• The apt_repository resource now ensures that keys are always dearmored. #14944

• You can now use multiple instances of the apt_repository resource with the same key URL. Previously, the key URL of the first instance that was executed would be imported, and subsequent key rings were not imported. #15218

• The apt_repository resource now supports newer APT versions when importing repository signing keys. #15220

• Fixed a file lock issue in the archive_file resource and ensured file handles are released after extraction. #14770

• The ohai resource now preserves the correct node attribute type for automatic attributes when Ohai reloads. #14761

• The ohai resource now correctly reloads custom Ohai plugins with the :reload action. Previously, it returned Ohai::Exceptions::AttributeNotFound: No such attribute #15090

• Chef no longer fails during the first converge when an ohai resource reloads and a cookbook provides custom Ohai plugins. #15295

Bug fixes

• Fixed a regression where Infra Client runs could fail with JSON::GeneratorError: "\xEA" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 when handling non-UTF-8 data returned from external APIs #15332

• Fixed an ffi-libarchive load error from the Habitat package on Windows. #15149

• Fixed dearmoring idempotency. #15044

• Prevented reporting of enormous registry key values and allowed the suppression of other values in a key for the “before” report. #14767

• Fixed an issue where Whatsinstalled returned erroneous package names. #14821

• Fixed an error when the ‘chef-vault’ attribute is undefined. #14811

• User privileges are now cleared before deleting a user in Windows. #14581

• Fixed issues with multiple Homebrew binaries on ARM. #14544

• Fixed an edge-case crash when reporting skipped resources: Chef now safely ignores resource_skipped events when no current action record exists, preventing NoMethodError and improving run stability. #14582

Packages

• We now provide OS-native and Habitat-based Chef Infra Client packages.

  This provides support for Chef Infra Client on the following platforms:

  • Currently supported Linux distributions and versions running Linux kernel 2.6.32 and later

  • Currently supported Windows versions greater than or equal to Windows 10.

  #14586

• We no longer build packages for Intel-based Macs. #15352

• We no longer build Linux kernel 2 packages. #14595

• We no longer produce Omnibus builds for Chef Infra Client and associated tools.

• Added a Chef Infra Client Debian installer. #14775

Dependency updates

• Updated the chef-powershell gem to 18.6.6. #15426

• Updated chef-zero and rest-client. #15419

Security

• This release doesn’t support FIPS Mode.

Known issues

• This release doesn’t support FIPS Mode.

• The chef_client_systemd_timer resource doesn’t work with SELinux.

Get the Build
Visit the Chef Downloads Portal to obtain the latest release, and then use the Install Docs to get started managing your infrastructure.**
**
You’ll need a license key to download Chef Infra Client 19 using automated tooling, such as mixlib-install. To begin your journey with enhanced support, a complete ecosystem, and access to premium content, contact your Progress sales representative for a commercial license. To obtain a limited-capability free or trial license key for Chef Infra Client, use the Free/Trial License Form.