[chef] Announcing POSHChef

[Russell Seymour < >]

Hello Everyone,

I have pleasure in announcing POSHChef, a native PowerShell chef client for Windows.

POSHChef is a PowerShell module that uses the Chef Server API to peform (most) of the functionality of chef-client using PowerShell.  It uses DSC (Desired State Configuration) under the covers to ensure that the configuration is correct.  There are three main reasons for writing it:

1.  Chef requires Ruby to be installed.  Admittedly this is easier with the Omnibus installer, but it is still an extra overhead on Windows.

2.  Users and developers from a Microsoft background would have to know Ruby to allow PowerShell to be executed, making the learning curve for the adoption of Chef harder.

3.  The way in which PowerShell is executed by Chef makes testing of the PowerShell code more difficult.

POSHChef takes its direction from Chef.  So much so that it is possible to incorporate PowerShell recipes and DSC resources into existing Cookbooks, making it feasible to have cross platform cookbooks using different clients to execute them.  There are some limitations to what it can do and these are documented on the Wiki.

The code is hosted on GitHub and can be found at https://github.com/POSHChef/POSHChef.

The Wiki is located at https://github.com/POSHChef/POSHChef.wiki

Currently there is no build process to create a package of any type for POSHChef, but this is being worked and will be available in Q1 2015.

The module has a dependency on the Logging module, which has also been released and can be found at https://github.com/POSHChef/Logging.

Additionally there are some supporting cookbooks that are designed to be used with POSHChef:

  * POSHChef - provides ability to schedule POSHChef as task in Task Scheduler

  * Pester - Provides ability to run tests at the end of a POSHChef run

  * DevCook - Allows development of POSHChef compliant cookbooks to be tested on a local machine

  * Chocolatey - Provides DSC resource to allow applications to be installed from the Chocolatey repository

These are all hosted in the main GitHub organisation which is https://github.com/POSHChef.

This has been developed as an enhancement of Chef.  Its development by no means is meant to belittle the great work of the Chef team.  I have been using Chef for the past 5 years and highly rate it and I will continue to use it on my non-Windows machines.

Development has taken just over a year and we are now using it to help provision Windows environments.  As always there will be bugs and things that do not work as well as they should, so please log issues on GitHub and we will get to them.  Please have a look and a play and let us know what you think.

Regards,

Russell Seymour

POSHChef