[chef] Re: version of chef to use for workstation along with hosted chef

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Monday, December 31, 2012 at 10:42 AM, John Griessen wrote:

I'm new at chef, so want to be able to ask questioins using the version

most people use, that is up to date, but not buggy. Hosted Chef needs v0.9.0 at least.

Is there any advantage to newer than v0.10 that is available with debian squeeze?

"Omnibus Installer includes the Chef client, a stable version of Ruby, and everything else needed for Chef to run, in a single

package."

So are most folks on this list using the chef versions of dependencies rather than

debian packages?

You definitely don't want 0.9 if you're starting out--that series is EOL and not getting security updates.

The omnibus installer is the easiest way to go, and it uses system packages under the hood (the install.sh is basically a wrapper around curl/wget plus dpkg/rpm/etc).

The standard Debian/Ubuntu packages will continue to be available. One downside to these is that Opscode doesn't have control over major components (e.g., ruby) so there are sometimes bugs that we can't do much to fix caused by upstream packages.

At Opscode we used to install by gem on top of system-provided ruby, but have switched to all omnibus packages. There were a few hiccups, mostly caused by our own recipe code, but in general it's been much better. 

As for a version that's "up to date and not buggy," I think the latest (10.16.4) is a good choice; there were a few bugs related to the big features added in 10.14.0, which have pretty much all been found and fixed by now. 10.18.0 is in testing and mostly adds forward compatibility with 11.0 features.

For someone starting with Chef, I believe the error handling added with 10.14 will be a huge help in finding mistakes from typos, etc. There's also "whyrun" mode, which is a dry run mode with some extra sauce to be more informative in cases that would otherwise be errors. This may or may not be helpful for learning/testing/integrating Chef into your infrastructure depending on your team and workflow. 

-- 
Daniel DeLeo