chef-12-rc-blog.md

Ohai chefs,

We are super excited to announce the availability of the first Chef Client 12.0.0 Release Candidate that accompanies the recently released Chef Server 12 Release Candidate.

In this major version release, we have all the features we've decided to complete as a community, around 70 contributions from Chef community and lots of minor features / bug fixes. You can see the full list of changes in our change log and more information in our release notes.

Backwards Compatibility

The biggest highlight of the Chef Client 12 release is the backward compatibility. Chef Client 12 is fully backwards compatible with Chef 11. You can use Chef Client 12 against Enterprise Chef, Open Source Chef, Hosted Chef and Chef Server 12 with your existing cookbooks and Chef data. See the section below for instructions about how to get this release for your version of Chef.

Highlights

Some of the highlights of this release are:

• SSL verification is now enabled by default for Chef.
• Ruby version in omnibus packages is updated to 2.1.3 (2.0.0 for windows).
• Thanks to Noah Kantrowitz, Chef RFC 17 - File Specificity Overhaul is now implemented.
• partial_search cookbook is now part of Chef Client.
• Chef Client now has a dynamic resolver for finding the right providers for resources.
• Chef Client now logs basic events in the Event Log when running on Windows.

How to get it?

On non-windows platforms, you can install Chef Client 12 release candidates with our install script:

To install latest release candidate:

curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- -p

To install a specific release candidate:

curl -L https://www.getchef.com/chef/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- -v 12.0.0.rc.0

On Windows, you can download this release using this link:

Chef Client 12.0.0.rc.0 Windows Package

Note for Enterprise Chef Server Users!!

Enterprise Chef Server has a configuration setting ['private_chef']['lb']['chef_max_version']that restricts the maximum version of Chef Client that can talk to the server. The default value of this setting is 11. Because of this setting, Chef Client 12.0.0 can not talk to Enterprise Chef Server by default.

We are removing this setting with Enterprise Chef Server 11.2.4. If you can not upgrade to Enterprise Chef Server 11.2.4 at this time, make sure you change this setting in order to try this release candidate in your environment:

1. Add ['private_chef']['lb']['chef_max_version'] = 11 to your private-chef.rb
2. Run sudo private-chef-ctl reconfigure

Test Drive

We would like to make sure the migration path to Chef Client 12 is as frictionless as possible. So we need your help to finalize this release. Try this release candidate and let us know if you run into any problems. You can file a new issue or reach out to us via our mailing list for any issues.