[Pre-Release Announcement] Chef 13.0

thommay · April 6, 2017, 10:46pm

Ohai Chefs!

We have selected 13.0.113 as our Chef v13.0 release candidate which is scheduled for release on Monday April 10, 2017.
This is the first release of Chef 13, and as such we are removing a lot of old, broken code. We’d love for as many people as possible to get this in to your CI environments and let us know the results. A large number of community cookbooks have already been updated to provide Chef Client 13 compatibility, so please make sure you’re up to date there, too.
Thanks!

Release Highlights

Rubygems provider sources behavior changed.

The behavior of gem_package and chef_gem is now to always apply the Chef::Config[:rubygems_uri] sources, which may be a
String uri or an Array of Strings. If additional sources are put on the resource with the source property those are added
to the configured :rubygems_uri sources.

This should enable easier setup of rubygems mirrors particularly in “airgapped” environments through the use of the global config
variable. It also means that an admin may force all rubygems.org traffic to an internal mirror, while still being able to
consume external cookbooks which have resources which add other mirrors unchanged (in a non-airgapped environment).

In the case where a resource must force the use of only the specified source(s), then the include_default_source property
has been added – setting it to false will remove the Chef::Config[:rubygems_url] setting from the list of sources for
that resource.

The behavior of the clear_sources property is now to only add --clear-sources and has no magic side effects on the source options.

Ruby version upgraded to 2.4.1

We’ve upgraded to the latest stable release of the Ruby programming
language. See the Ruby 2.4.0 Release Notes for an overview of what’s new in the language.

Resource can now declare a default name

The core apt_update resource can now be declared without any name argument, no need for apt_update "this string doesn't matter but why do i have to type it?".

This can be used by any other resource by just overriding the name property and supplying a default:

  property :name, String, default: ""

Notifications to resources with empty strings as their name is also supported via either the bare resource name (apt_update –
matches what the user types in the DSL) or with empty brackets (apt_update[] – matches the resource notification pattern).

The knife ssh command applies the same fuzzifier as knife search node

A bare name to knife search node will search for the name in tags, roles, fqdn, addresses, policy_name or policy_group fields and will
match when given partial strings (available since Chef 11). The knife ssh search term has been similarly extended so that the
search API matches in both cases. The node search fuzzifier has also been extracted out to a fuzz option to Chef::Search::Query for re-use
elsewhere.

Cookbook root aliases

Rather than attributes/default.rb, cookbooks can now use attributes.rb in
the root of the cookbook. Similarly for a single default recipe, cookbooks can
use recipe.rb in the root of the cookbook.

knife ssh can now connect to gateways with ssh key authentication

The new gateway_identity_file option allows the operator to specify
the key to access ssh gateways with.

Windows Task resource added

The windows_task resource has been ported from the windows cookbook,
and many bugs have been fixed.

Solaris SMF services can now been started recursively

It is now possible to load Solaris services recursively, by ensuring the
new options property of the service resource contains -r.

It’s now possible to blacklist node attributes

This is the inverse of the pre-existing whitelisting functionality.

The guard interpreter for `powershell_script` is Powershell, again

When writing not_if or only_if statements, by default we now run
those statements using powershell, rather than forcing the user to set
guard_interpreter each time.

Zypper GPG checks by default

Zypper now defaults to performing gpg checks of packages.

The InSpec gem is now shipped by default

The inspec and train gems are shipped by default in the chef omnibus
package, making it easier for users in airgapped environments to use
InSpec.

Backwards Compatibility Breaks

Resource Cloning has been removed

When Chef compiles resources, it will no longer attempt to merge the
properties of previously compiled resources with the same name and type
in to the new resource. See the deprecation page for further information.

It is an error to specify both `default` and `name_property` on a property

Chef 12 made this work by picking the first option it found, but it was
always an error and has now been disallowed.

The path property of the execute resource has been removed

It was never implemented in the provider, so it was always a no-op to use it, the remediation is
to simply delete it.

Using the command property on any script resource (including bash, etc) is now a hard error

This was always a usage mistake. The command property was used internally by the script resource and was not intended to be exposed
to users. Users should use the code property instead (or use the command property on an execute resource to execute a single command).

Omitting the code property on any script resource (including bash, etc) is now a hard error

It is possible that this was being used as a no-op resource, but the log resource is a better choice for that until we get a null
resource added. Omitting the code property or mixing up the code property with the command property are also common usage mistakes
that we need to catch and error on.

The chef_gem resource defaults to not run at compile time

The compile_time true flag may still be used to force compile time.

The Chef::Config[:chef_gem_compile_time] config option has been removed

In order to for community cookbooks to behave consistently across all users this optional flag has been removed.

The `supports[:manage_home]` and `supports[:non_unique]` API has been removed from all user providers

The remediation is to set the manage_home and non_unique properties directly.

Using relative paths in the `creates` property of an execute resource with specifying a `cwd` is now a hard error

Without a declared cwd the relative path was (most likely?) relative to wherever chef-client happened to be invoked which is
not deterministic or easy to intuit behavior.

Chef::PolicyBuilder::ExpandNodeObject#load_node has been removed

This change is most likely to only affect internals of tooling like chefspec if it affects anything at all.

PolicyFile failback to create non-policyfile nodes on Chef Server < 12.3 has been removed

PolicyFile users on Chef-13 should be using Chef Server 12.3 or higher.

Cookbooks with self dependencies are no longer allowed

The remediation is removing the self-dependency depends line in the metadata.

Removed `supports` API from Chef::Resource

Retained only for the service resource (where it makes some sense) and for the mount resource.

Removed retrying of non-StandardError exceptions for Chef::Resource

Exceptions not decending from StandardError (e.g. LoadError, SecurityError, SystemExit) will no longer trigger a retry if they are raised during the executiong of a resources with a non-zero retries setting.

Removed deprecated `method_missing` access from the Chef::Node object

Previously, the syntax node.foo.bar could be used to mean node["foo"]["bar"], but this API had sharp edges where methods collided
with the core ruby Object class (e.g. node.class) and where it collided with our own ability to extend the Chef::Node API. This
method access has been deprecated for some time, and has been removed in Chef-13.

Changed `declare_resource` API

Dropped the create_if_missing parameter that was immediately supplanted by the edit_resource API (most likely nobody ever used
this) and converted the created_at parameter from an optional positional parameter to a named parameter. These changes are unlikely
to affect any cookbook code.

Node deep-duping fixes

The node.to_hash/node.to_h and node.dup APIs have been fixed so that they correctly deep-dup the node data structure including every
string value. This results in a mutable copy of the immutable merged node structure. This is correct behavior, but is now more expensive
and may break some poor code (which would have been buggy and difficult to follow code with odd side effects before).

For example:

node.default["foo"] = "fizz"
n = node.to_hash   # or node.dup
n["foo"] << "buzz"

before this would have mutated the original string in-place so that node["foo"] and node.default["foo"] would have changed to "fizzbuzz"
while now they remain “fizz” and only the mutable n["foo"] copy is changed to “fizzbuzz”.

Freezing immutable merged attributes

Since Chef 11 merged node attributes have been intended to be immutable but the merged strings have not been frozen. In Chef 13, in the
process of merging the node attributes strings and other simple objects are dup’d and frozen. In order to get a mutable copy, you can
now correctly use the node.dup or node.to_hash methods, or you should mutate the object correctly through its precedence level like
node.default["some_string"] << "appending_this".

The Chef::REST API has been removed

It has been fully replaced with Chef::ServerAPI in chef-client code.

Properties overriding methods now raise an error

Defining a property that overrides methods defined on the base ruby Object or on Chef::Resource itself can cause large amounts of
confusion. A simple example is property :hash which overrides the Object#hash method which will confuse ruby when the Custom Resource
is placed into the Chef::ResourceCollection which uses a Hash internally which expects to call Object#hash to get a unique id for the
object. Attempting to create property :action would also override the Chef::Resource#action method which is unlikely to end well for
the user. Overriding inherited properties is still supported.

`chef-shell` now supports solo and legacy solo modes

Running chef-shell -s or chef-shell --solo will give you an experience consistent with chef-solo. chef-shell --solo-legacy-mode
will give you an experience consistent with chef-solo --legacy-mode.

Chef::Platform.set and related methods have been removed

The deprecated code has been removed. All providers and resources should now be using Chef >= 12.0 provides syntax.

Remove `sort` option for the Search API

This option has been unimplemented on the server side for years, so any use of it has been pointless.

Remove Chef::ShellOut

This was deprecated and replaced a long time ago with mixlib-shellout and the shell_out mixin.

Remove `method_missing` from the Recipe DSL

The core of chef hasn’t used this to implement the Recipe DSL since 12.5.1 and its unlikely that any external code depended upon it.

Simplify Recipe DSL wiring

Support for actions with spaces and hyphens in the action name has been dropped. Resources and property names with spaces and hyphens
most likely never worked in Chef-12. UTF-8 characters have always been supported and still are.

`easy_install` resource has been removed

The Python easy_install package installer has been deprecated for many years,
so we have removed support for it. No specific replacement for pip is being
included with Chef at this time, but a pip-based python_package resource is
available in the poise-python cookbooks.

Removal of run_command and popen4 APIs

All the APIs in chef/mixlib/command have been removed. They were deprecated by mixlib-shellout and the shell_out mixin API.

Iconv has been removed from the ruby libraries and chef omnibus build

The ruby Iconv library was replaced by the Encoding library in ruby 1.9.x and since the deprecation of ruby 1.8.7 there has been no need
for the Iconv library but we have carried it forwards as a dependency since removing it might break some chef code out there which used
this library. It has now been removed from the ruby build. This also removes LGPLv3 code from the omnibus build and reduces build
headaches from porting iconv to every platform we ship chef-client on.

This will also affect nokogiri, but that gem natively supports UTF-8, UTF-16LE/BE, ISO-8851-1(Latin-1), ASCII and “HTML” encodings. Users
who really need to write something like Shift-JIS inside of XML will need to either maintain their own nokogiri installs or will need to
convert to using UTF-8.

Deprecated cookbook metadata has been removed

The recommends, suggests, conflicts, replaces and grouping
metadata fields are no longer supported, and have been removed, since
they were never used. Chef will ignore them in existing metadata.rb
files, but we recommend that you remove them. This was proposed in RFC 85.

All unignored cookbook files will now be uploaded.

We now treat every file under a cookbook directory as belonging to a
cookbook, unless that file is ignored with a chefignore file. This is
a change from the previous behaviour where only files in certain
directories, such as recipes or templates, were treated as special.
This change allows chef to support new classes of files, such as Ohai
plugins or Inspec tests, without having to make changes to the cookbook
format to support them.

DSL-based custom resources and providers no longer get module constants

Up until now, creating a mycook/resources/thing.rb would create a Chef::Resources::MycookThing name to access the resource class object.
This const is no longer created for resources and providers. You can access resource classes through the resolver API like:

Chef::Resource.resource_for_node(:mycook_thing, node)

Accessing a provider class is a bit more complex, as you need a resource against which to run a resolution like so:

Chef::ProviderResolver.new(node, find_resource!("mycook_thing[name]"), :nothing).resolve

Default values for resource properties are frozen

A resource declaring something like:

property :x, default: {}

will now see the default value set to be immutable. This prevents cases of
modifying the default in one resource affecting others. If you want a per-resource
mutable default value, define it inside a lazy{} helper like:

property :x, default: lazy { {} }

Resources which later modify their name during creation will have their name changed on the ResourceCollection and notifications

some_resource "name_one" do
  name "name_two"
end

The fix for sending notifications to multipackage resources involved changing the API which inserts resources into the resource collection slightly
so that it no longer directly takes the string which is typed into the DSL but reads the (possibly coerced) name off of the resource after it is
built. The end result is that the above resource will be named some_resource[name_two] instead of some_resource[name_one]. Note that setting
the name (not the name_property, but actually renaming the resource) is very uncommon. The fix is to simply name the resource correctly in
the first place (some_resource "name_two" do ...)

`use_inline_resources` is always enabled

The use_inline_resources provider mode is always enabled when using the
action :name do ... end syntax. You can remove the use_inline_resources
line.

`knife cookbook site vendor` has been removed

Please use knife cookbook site install instead.

`knife cookbook create` has been removed

Please use chef generate cookbook from the ChefDK instead.

Verify commands no longer support “%{file}”

Chef has always recommended %{path}, and %{file} has now been
removed.

The `partial_search` recipe method has been removed

The partial_search method has been fully replaced by the
filter_result argument to search, and has now been removed.

The logger and formatter settings are more predictable

The default now is the formatter. There is no more automatic switching to the logger when logging or when output
is sent to a pipe. The logger needs to be specifically requested with --force-logger or it will not show up.

The --force-formatter option does still exist, although it will probably be deprecated in the future.

If your logfiles switch to the formatter, you need to include --force-logger for your daemonized runs.

Redirecting output to a file with chef-client > /tmp/chef.out now captures the same output as invoking it directly on the command
line with no redirection.

Path Sanity disabled by default and modified

The chef client itself no long modifies its ENV['PATH'] variable directly. When using the shell_out API now, in addition to
setting up LANG/LANGUAGE/LC_ALL variables that API will also inject certain system paths and the ruby bindir and gemdirs into
the PATH (or Path on Windows). The shell_out_with_systems_locale API still does not mangle any environment variables. During
the Chef-13 lifecycle changes will be made to prep Chef-14 to switch so that shell_out by default behaves like
shell_out_with_systems_locale. A new flag will get introduced to call shell_out(..., internal: [true|false]) to either
get the forced locale and path settings (“internal”) or not. When that is introduced in Chef 13.x the default will be true
(backwards-compat with 13.0) and that default will change in 14.0 to ‘false’.

The PATH changes have also been tweaked so that the ruby bindir and gemdir PATHS are prepended instead of appended to the PATH.
Some system directories are still appended.

Some examples of changes:

which ruby in 12.x will return any system ruby and fall back to the embedded ruby if using omnibus
which ruby in 13.x will return any system ruby and will not find the embedded ruby if using omnibus
shell_out_with_systems_locale("which ruby") behaves the same as which ruby above
shell_out("which ruby") in 12.x will return any system ruby and fall back to the embedded ruby if using omnibus
shell_out("which ruby") in 13.x will always return the omnibus ruby first (but will find the system ruby if not using omnibus)

The PATH in shell_out can also be overridden:

shell_out("which ruby", env: { "PATH" => nil }) - behaves like shell_out_with_systems_locale()
shell_out("which ruby", env: { "PATH" => [...include PATH string here...] }) - set it arbitrarily however you need

Since most providers which launch custom user commands use shell_out_with_systems_locale (service, execute, script, etc) the behavior
will be that those commands that used to be having embedded omnibus paths injected into them no longer will. Generally this will
fix more problems than it solves, but may causes issues for some use cases.

Default guard clauses (`not_if`/`only_if`) do not change the PATH or other env vars

The implementation switched to shell_out_with_systems_locale to match execute resource, etc.

Chef Client will now exit using the RFC062 defined exit codes

Chef Client will only exit with exit codes defined in RFC 062. This allows other tooling to respond to how a Chef run completes. Attempting to exit Chef Client with an unsupported exit code (either via Chef::Application.fatal! or Chef::Application.exit!) will result in an exit code of 1 (GENERIC_FAILURE) and a warning in the event log.

When Chef Client is running as a forked process on unix systems, the standardized exit codes are used by the child process. To actually have Chef Client return the standard exit code, client_fork false will need to be set in Chef Client’s configuration file.

Please see the CHANGELOG for the complete list of changes.

Ohai Release Notes 13.0:

New Features

New Secondary Plugin Path

By default Ohai will now look for additional plugins within /etc/chef/ohai/plugins or C:\chef\ohai\plugins. This makes it easy to drop off additional plugins during bootstrap or using the ohai cookbook without the need to edit client.rb or reload Ohai.

Version Matching With Chef

Ohai has been bumped from version 8.23 to version 13.0 to match the chef-client. We’ll be keeping versions in sync between ohai and chef-client so you always know what version of ohai shipped with chef-client.

Lua and Scala Detection

Lua and Scala version detection has been improved to work in more situations

AWS Metadata Detection

We now detect availability_zone and region information for EC2

DMI Detection

We now detect DMI types 40-41: additional_information, onboard_devices_extended_information, and management_controller_host_interfaces.

Back Compatibility Breaks

Amazon is now platform_family of amazon

As time has gone on Amazon Linux has become less and less like other RHEL derivatives. We’re now detecting amazon as its own platform_family to make writing Amazon Linux compatible cookbooks easier

Cloud plugin replaced with Cloud V2

The legacy cloud plugin that provided node[‘cloud’] has been replaced with the Cloud V2 plugin. If you previously used data from the Cloud plugin you will see a new, more robust, data struct at node[‘cloud’].

Filesystems plugin replaced with Filesystem V2

The legacy filesystem plugin that provided node[‘fileystem’] has been replaced with the Filesystem V2 plugin. If you previously used data from the Filesystem plugin you will see a new, more robust, data struct at node[‘filesystem’].

Freezing Ohai Strings

All Ohai strings are now frozen to prevent modification within cookbooks and to save memory

Removal of SBT Detection

The latest versions of sbt no longer include a sbt --version command and other methods of version detection require setting up a project in the working directory. Until a better version detection method can be determine we’re removed sbt detection.

Ruby 2.3+

Ohai now requires Ruby 2.3 instead of 2.1. This change aligns the Ruby requirements of Ohai with that of chef-client

Legacy Config Removal (Ohai-1)

The legacy Ohai config format used in the Chef client.rb config has been removed. See https://docs.chef.io/deprecations_ohai_legacy_config.html for details.

Sigar gem based plugins removal (OHAI-2)

Sigar gem based plugins have been removed from Ohai. See https://docs.chef.io/deprecations_ohai_sigar_plugins.html for details.

run_command and popen4 helper method removal (OHAI-3)

The legacy run_command and popen4 helper methods have been removed. See https://docs.chef.io/deprecations_ohai_run_command_helpers.html for details.

Windows CPU plugin attribute changes. (OHAI-5)

The windows cpu model_name attribute has been updated to return the correct value. See https://docs.chef.io/deprecations_ohai_windows_cpu.html for details.

DigitalOcean plugin attribute changes (OHAI-6)

The DigitalOcean plugin has been completely rewritten to pull data from the DigitalOcean metadata endpoint, giving us more detailed droplet information. This changed the format of the data returned by Ohai. See https://docs.chef.io/deprecations_ohai_digitalocean.html for details.