Chef Workstation 26 RC3

Chef Workstation 26 RC3 delivers a comprehensive, unified toolkit that empowers developers, operations teams, and system administrators to automate infrastructure management and compliance workflows. This release provides all essential tools required to efficiently build, test, and deploy infrastructure code, ensuring seamless configuration management across diverse environments.

Chef Workstation represents a complete development environment for Chef, consolidating critical tools into a single, cohesive package that streamlines the infrastructure-as-code workflow from development through production deployment.

What’s new in RC3

The RC3 release of Chef Workstation 26 represents a significant architectural evolution, featuring:

Habitat-Based Architecture: All core components have been migrated to Habitat packages, providing improved dependency management, isolation, and cross-platform consistency
Enhanced Knife Integration: Full Habitat packaging of Knife and associated drivers, enabling more reliable plugin management and execution
InSpec Integration: InSpec compliance and security testing framework is now included, providing comprehensive infrastructure and application auditing capabilities
Unified Package Distribution: Consolidated delivery mechanism through Habitat, simplifying installation and updates across enterprise environments
Improved Tool Accessibility: All included tools are accessible through standardized wrapper scripts for a consistent user experience

This release builds upon the foundation established in Chef Workstation 26 RC2, with continued refinement of the Habitat-based packaging system and expanded tool support.

This release builds upon the foundation established in RC2, with continued refinement of the Habitat-based packaging system and expanded tool support.

Included tools and components

Chef Workstation RC3 includes the following fully integrated tools:

Core development tools

Chef CLI (chef-cli): Primary command-line interface for Chef development workflows, providing unified access to common Chef operations
Chef Infra Client RC3: Latest release candidate of the Chef Infra Client, enabling infrastructure automation and configuration management
Knife: Essential tool for interacting with Chef Infra Server, managing nodes, cookbooks, roles, and other Chef objects
InSpec: Latest release candidate of InSpec 7, enabling compliance and security testing.

Testing and quality assurance

Chef Test Kitchen Enterprise: Comprehensive testing framework for validating infrastructure code across multiple platforms and environments
InSpec: Compliance and security testing framework for auditing infrastructure and applications against security standards and regulations
Cookstyle: Ruby and Chef cookbook linting tool that enforces style guidelines and best practices
Fauxhai: Mock Ohai data generator for testing purposes, enabling rapid cookbook testing without requiring actual systems

Dependency and secret management

Berkshelf: Cookbook dependency manager that streamlines the process of managing and retrieving cookbook dependencies
Chef Vault: Secure data management tool for encrypting and managing secrets within Chef workflows
Ohai: System profiling tool that detects and reports system attributes for use in Chef recipes

Known limitations

`chef` command deprecation

The legacy chef command is deprecated and isn’t functional in this release. All users must transition to using chef-cli commands instead. This change aligns with Chef’s strategic direction toward a more modular and maintainable command structure.

# Deprecated (will not work)
chef generate cookbook my_cookbook

# Correct usage
chef-cli generate cookbook my_cookbook

Support and feedback

As this is a release candidate, we actively encourage feedback from the community:

Issues and Bugs: Report issues through the official Chef GitHub repository
Feature Requests: Submit enhancement requests through Chef’s community forums
Documentation: See the Chef documentation for comprehensive guides and tutorials
Community Support: Join the Chef Community Slack for real-time assistance