Chef Workstation 21.1.247 Released!

Chef Release Announcements
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We are delighted to announce the availability of version 21.1.247 of Chef Workstation.

Chef Infra Client

Chef Infra Client has been updated from 16.9.20 to 16.9.32.

  • Resolved orphaned PowerShell processes when using Compliance Remediation content.
  • Resolved failures from running chef-client on some Windows systems.
  • Compliance Phase: Improved detection of the audit cookbook when it is used for compliance reporting.
  • chef-shell: Added support for loading configs in client.d directories - Thanks @jaymzh!

Chef InSpec

Chef InSpec has been updated from 4.24.32 to 4.26.14.

New Features

  • You can now directly refer to settings in the nginx_conf resource using the its syntax. Thanks @rgeissert!
  • You can now specify the shell type for WinRM connections using the --winrm-shell-type option. Thanks @catriona1!
  • Plugin settings can now be set programmatically. Thanks @tecracer-theinen!
  • OpenSSH Client on Windows can now be tested with the ssh_config and sshd_config resources. Thanks @rgeissert!
  • The --reporter-message-truncation option now also truncates the code_desc field, preventing failures when sending large reports to Automate.

Bug Fixes

  • Updated the oracledb_session to use more general invocation options. Thanks @pacopal!
  • Fixed an error with the http resource in Chef Infra Client by including faraday_middleware in the gemspec.
  • Fixed an incompatibility between parslet and toml in Chef Infra Client.
  • Improved programmatic plugin configuration.

Test Kitchen

Test Kitchen has been updated from 2.9 to 2.10.

Uploading Files In the Provisioner

Test Kitchen now allows you to upload files from your workstation to the test node within the provisioner. The new uploads config accepts a hash mapping local files to files on the remote test node. Thanks for this new feature @tecracer-theinen!

Uploading a config file before running Chef Infra Client

provisioner:
  name: chef_zero
  uploads:
    "foo.cfg": "/etc/foo.cfg"

Includes/Excludes Filters in Lifecycle Hooks

You can now exclude or include platforms from running in a lifecycle hook. This is particularly useful when running commands like apt-get update which can only be run on certain systems. Thanks for this new feature @jasonwbarnett!

Excluding apt-get update on RHEL

lifecycle:
  pre_converge:
    - remote: | 
        "apt-get update"
      exclude:
        - rhel-7
        - rhel-8

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved uninitialized constant Kitchen::Loader::YAML::Psych error - @dwmarshall

Kitchen Inspec Verifier

The kitchen-inspec verifier plugin has been updated from 2.2.2 to 2.3.0. This new release improves performance by setting the backend_cache config to true by default.

Chef CLI

The Chef CLI has been updated to allow chef generate to properly create files in subdirectories.

Get the Build

If you are running the Chef Workstation toolbar 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!

Meeting notes for February 4th, 2021