Chef Workstation 0.12.20 Released!

Chef Release Announcements
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We are delighted to announce the availability of version 0.12.20 of Chef Workstation.

Updated Components

Chef Infra Client

The Chef Infra Client has been updated from 15.4.45 to 15.5.16 with updated helpers, Chefignore improvements, and a new chef_sleep resource:

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 on 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.

chef_sleep Resource

The new 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

Cookstyle

The Cookstyle cookbook linter has been updated from 5.10 to 5.13 and includes 17 new Chef cops for detecting deprecated and outdated cookbook code. This release also updates the underlying RuboCop engine used by Cookstyle which includes a large number of bug fixes that better detect violations and prevent false positives. See the Cookstyle Release Notes for a complete list of changes between 5.10 and 5.13.

This new release also allows you to use cookstyle specific comments in your cookbook code to enable or disable cops instead of the standard rubocop comments. We think that it will be easier to understand the cops that you intend to control if you use cookstyle comments. You can continue to use the existing rubocop comments, if you prefer them, since both types of comments will be honored by Cookstyle.

Rubocop comment to disable a cop:

'node.normal[:foo] # rubocop: disable ChefCorrectness/Bar'

Cookstyle comment to disable a cop:

'node.normal[:foo] # cookstyle: disable ChefCorrectness/Bar'

Foodcritic

Foodcritic has been updated from 16.1.1 to 16.2.0. This release includes a fix for detecting incorrect notification actions and ships with updated Chef Infra Client Metadata. Keep in mind that Foodcritic is no longer being actively developed and users should migrate to Cookstyle instead.

Chef InSpec

Chef InSpec has been updated from 4.18.0 to 4.18.39. This release includes a large number of bug fixes to resources:

  • The service resource now includes a startname property for Windows and systemd services.
  • 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.

knife-ec2

The knife-ec2 plugin has been updated from 1.0.16 to 1.0.17 which includes a fix for an error when launching non-T2 type instances.

Performance Improvements

This release of Chef Workstation ships with several optimizations to our Ruby installation that improve the performance of the included commands, especially on Windows systems. Expect to see more here in future releases.

Smaller Installation Size

We've continued to optimize Chef Workstation to reduce the install size. Chef Workstation 0.12 has ~5% fewer files than the 0.11 release. Stay tuned for further optimizations of our install footprint in the coming months.

Get the Build

If you are running the experimental application you can download this version from the menu after the app next update check. You can also download binaries directly from downloads.chef.io.

As always, we welcome your feedback and invite you to contact us directly or share your email. Thanks for using Chef Workstation!