[Pre-Release Announcement] Chef Client 13.6.0

Ohai Chefs!

We have selected 13.6.0 as our Chef v13.6 release candidate which is scheduled for release on Monday October 30, 2017.

Release Highlights

deploy Resource Is Deprecated

The deploy resource (and its alter ego deploy_revision) have been deprecated,
to be removed in Chef 14. This is being done because this resource is considered
overcomplicated and error-prone in the modern Chef ecosystem. A compatibility
cookbook will be available to help users migrate during the Chef 14 release
cycle. See the deprecation documentation
for more information.

zypper_package supports package downgrades

zypper_package now supports downgrading installed packages with the
allow_downgrade property.

InSpec updated to 1.42.3

Reserve certain Data Bag names

It’s no longer possible to create data bags named node, role,
client, or environment. Existing data bags will continue to work as
before.

Properly use yum on RHEL 7

If both dnf and yum were installed, in some circumstances the yum
provider might choose to run dnf, which is not what we intended it to
do. It now properly runs yum, all the time.

Ohai 13.6 Release Notes:

Critical Plugins

Users can now specify a list of plugins which are critical. Critical plugins will cause Ohai to fail if they do not run successfully (and thus cause a Chef run using Ohai to fail). The syntax for this is:

ohai.critical_plugins << :Filesystem

Filesystem now has a allow_partial_data configuration option

The Filesystem plugin now has a allow_partial_data configuration option. If set, the filesystem will return whatever data it can even if some commands it ran failed.

Rackspace detection on Windows

Windows nodes running on Rackspace will now properly detect themselves as running on Rackspace without a hint file.

Package data on Amazon Linux

The Packages plugin now supports gathering packages data on Amazon Linux

Please see the CHANGELOG for the complete list of changes.

Get the Build

As always, you can download binaries directly from downloads.chef.io or by using the new mixlib-install command line utility available in ChefDK 0.19.6 or greater.

$ mixlib-install download chef -v 13.6.0 -c current

Alternatively, you can install Chef using one of the following command options:

# In Shell
$ curl https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- -P chef -v 13.6.0 -c current

# In Windows Powershell
. { iwr -useb https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.ps1 } | iex; install -project chef -version 13.6.0 -channel current