Push Jobs 2.1 Released

Chef Release Announcements
1

Ohai Chefs!

Chef Push Jobs 2.1 is released and available for download.

We want to thank everyone who participated in the Chef Push Jobs 2.0 alpha. Your feedback helped greatly in making this release successful. There are a number of changes and new features that are encompassed in this release, and we would like to take a moment to give you a quick overview of them. For more details, you should be sure to check out the Push Jobs 2.1 documentation.

It is important that you know Push Jobs 2.1 is not currently supported for use with Chef Automate.

Additionally, Push Jobs Server 2.X is not compatible with Push Jobs Client 1.X. We recommend that you upgrade all your Push Jobs Clients to 2.X before performing an upgrade of your Push Jobs Server.

Encryption

All command channel communication is encrypted via SSL or CurveZMQ. CurveZMQ is based on the CurveCP protocol. The one exception to this is the server heartbeat, which is broadcast in the clear (but is still signed with the server key for integrity).

Command Output Capture

Both the knife-push library and the Chef Push Jobs API provide options to direct the client to capture the job output and return it to the server for inspection:

% knife job start --capture "echo foobar" node1
Started. Job ID: 26e98ba162fa7ba6fb2793125553c7ae
.Complete.

% knife job output --channel stdout 26e98ba162fa7ba6fb2793125553c7ae node1
foobar

More details on the command output capture can be found on docs.chef.io.

Environment Control

The user has a lot more control over the execution environment of the remote command with three new options available to the knife push jobs start command.

This includes:

  • Environment variables (--with-env)
  • Execution directory (--in-dir)
  • Data file sent from the user to the push client (--file)
% knife job start --file .chef/knife.rb --capture --with-env '{"test": "foo"}' \
    --in-dir "/tmp" --as-user daemon "print_execution_environment" node2
Started. Job ID: 26e98ba162fac37787292637362808cb
...
 
% knife job output --channel stdout 26e98ba162fac37787292637362808cb node2
{"HOME"=>"/home/vagrant",
...
"CHEF_PUSH_JOB_FILE"=>"/tmp/pushy/pushy_file20150813-14250-125xv4u",
"CHEF_PUSH_JOB_ID"=>"26e98ba162fac37787292637362808cb",
"CHEF_PUSH_NODE_NAME"=>"test",
"PWD"=>"/srv/piab/mounts/opscode-pushy-client",
"SHELL"=>"/bin/bash",
"test"=>"foo"}

More details on the new environment controls can be found on docs.chef.io.

In addition to environment variables specified with the --with-env flag, there are three new special environment variables that are made available to you automatically:

  • CHEF_PUSH_JOB_FILE - The path to the temporary file containing the string you passed using the --file parameter.
  • CHEF_PUSH_NODE_NAME - The name of the node this instance of the push job is being run on.
  • CHEF_PUSH_JOB_ID - The ID for the job currently being run.

Server Sent Event Feeds

There are two new endpoints that provide feeds for the state of jobs on the server. There’s an organization-level feed that provides high level job start/completion information, and a per job feed that provides node level state changes for a particular job. As of this release, these feeds are only available via the Chef Push Jobs API.

Here is a quick example of what an organization-level feed might look like.

event: start
id: dcd37f50-2d77-4761-895b-33134dbf87d1
data: {"timestamp":"2014-07-10 05:10:40.995958Z","job":"B","command":"chef-client","run_timeout":300,"user":"rebecca","quorum":2,"node_count":2}

event: job_complete
id: dcd37f50-2d77-4761-895b-33134dbf87d2
data: {"timestamp":"2014-07-10 05:15:48.995958Z","job":"A","status":"success"}

event: start
id: dcd37f50-2d77-4761-895b-33134dbf87d3
data: {"timestamp":"2014-07-10 05:17:40.995958Z","job":"C","command":"cat /etc/passwd","run_timeout":300,"user":"charles","quorum":2,"node_count":2}

event: job_complete
id: dcd37f50-2d77-4761-895b-33134dbf87d4
data: {"timestamp":"2014-07-10 05:17:41.995958Z","job":"C","status":"success"}

event: job_complete
id: dcd37f50-2d77-4761-895b-33134dbf87d5
data: {"timestamp":"2014-07-10 05:20:48.995958Z","job":"B","status":"success"}

For more details about the job status feeds and the events that are available, please check out docs.chef.io.

Getting Started

Chef Push Jobs 2.1 is available now on downloads.chef.io. Chef Push Jobs 2.1 requires an on-premise installation of Chef Server v12.6 or later. To use the knife push commands above, you’ll need to have the knife-push gem v1.0.1 or later installed.