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Chef Infra Best Practices: #1 Using Cookstyle for Infra Client Upgrades

Believe it or not, infrastructure configuration solutions like Chef have been around for more than 10 years now. Over those 10 years, Chef has continued to improve the functionality of Chef Infra, requiring clients to not only upgrade to a new version, but also update some of the associated automation they have built. Depending on the current version being run, and the amount of automation built, upgrading Chef could have ended up being a major project itself.  

To minimize the amount of time and effort needed to upgrade to the current version of Chef Infra, we built Chef Cookstyle. And to help users learn more about how Cookstyle helps simplify the upgrade process (and other recently released Chef Infra Client features) we have launched the “Shape-Up Your Infrastructure Automation” quickfire webinar series.  

In the first installment, Chef Infra Product Manager Tim Smith (@tas50), provided an overview of Chef Cookstyle.  

Chef Cookstyle – Fix, Upgrade and Modernize 

Cookstyle is a code analysis tool built upon RuboCop that replaced Foodcritic in September 2019 and is shipped as part of Chef Workstation. Cookstyle helps users fix deprecations, upgrade Chef client, and modernize their codebase. 

Upgrade Process with Cookstyle

Today there are over 100 Chef Infra specific rules (called cops) shipped with Cookstyle that catch common cookbook coding mistakes, cleanup portions of code that are no longer necessary, and detect deprecations that prevent cookbooks from running on the latest releases of Chef Infra Client. 

Running Cookstyle on your infrastructure code not only ensures that everyone on your team is following a common coding style and avoid potential bugs, it also ensures that you’re utilizing the latest functionality the Chef Infra Client offers. 

To learn more about Cookstyle, watch the webinar with its creator, Tim Smith!  

The “Shape-up Your Infrastructure Automation” webinar series will continuous through 2021. Below are the next two schedule event that are now open for registration:  

Happy Automating!  

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Heather Peyton

Heather was a Product Marketing Director at Chef responsible for messaging around the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack. Prior to Chef Heather held DevOps related positions at CA and Worksoft. Heather started her tech career working for CompuCom, a large VAR/SI, where she focused on helping large organizations evaluate and deploy new and transformative technologies.