Blog
News, release notes, and write-ups from the Cinc project.
Cinc Server: forking for the long haul
In November 2025, Progress announced that the open-source Chef Infra Server is being retired in favor of the Chef 360 platform. The community edition will receive no new code, features, or security fixes after October 2026, and will reach formal end-of-life in November 2026. Existing repositories will go read-only at that point. This is similar in spirit to the upstream move to Habitat-only Workstation builds that triggered our Cinc Workstation fork earlier this year.
June 13, 2026
Cinc as highly available cluster
Introduction For most use cases a single instance of CINC will cover all your needs. It is a tool after all, and not a service that processes client traffic. But, if for some of you out there, having a single instance of anything is not acceptable, or if in your infrastructure CINC plays a crucial role, there is a way to have CINC in a highly available clustered setup. In this article we will go through setting up this on VM’s in your private cloud or with some cloud provider.
December 6, 2024
Migrating from Chef to Cinc
IntroMany users already in the Chef ecosystem may have reason to migrate from Chef Infra Server to Cinc server. Thankfully, this is a relatively painless process and all cookbooks, users, data bags, roles, environments, etc. can be retained during the migration process. This blog post documents the migration process from Chef Infra Server to Cinc Server in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Cinc Server SetupIn order to create your new Cinc Server, stand up a new server on your OS of choice by following the steps detailed at Server Installation.
February 5, 2024
Free products
Here’s the short list of changes people migrating solutions can expect to look into (updated 2023-11-02): Chef Infra™ client –> Cinc-client Chef Infra™ server –> Cinc-server or Goiardi Chef Inspec™ –> Cinc-auditor Chef Habitat™ –> see Cinc-project friends biome.sh Cinc’s own Habitat distro is considered low priority by the project in the presence of such a great alternative. Chef Workstation –> Cinc-Workstation Chef Automate -> Looking for contributors to help building it.
November 2, 2023
Cinc Server is now Stable
Thanks to our various contributors, we are excited to announce that Cinc Server 14.14.1 is the first release that is now considered stable! You can find additional information on how to install and use Cinc Server here.
April 20, 2022
Cinc and Kitchen Dokken
Why use Kitchen Dokken?In a word, speed. The kitchen-dokken plugin is designed to make testing your Cinc/Chef code as fast as possible. As you can probably determine from the name, the plugin uses containers to speed up the process, both for the OS being provisioned and for the Cinc/Chef client. There are of course some trade-offs required to achieve this speed, firstly the plugin is Chef/Cinc specific (not really an issue if you are reading this!
December 1, 2021
Breaking changes for redistributors
The short version This blog post is intended specifically for other folks that are building their own distributions of Chef Software’s product, and folks leveraging the tip from my previous blog in their cookbooks. We’re preparing to completely rewrite the current implementation of dist.rb in both Chef Infra and Chef Inspec. The short version is that we’re moving all the constants like Chef::Dist::PRODUCT to a new namespace and gem, respectively ChefUtils::Dist in the chef-utils gem.
May 10, 2020
April 2020 update
What’s new with Cinc? We’ve been busy! Since my last post in january, the team has not only kept up with releases of Cinc-Client and Cinc-Auditor but also improved many aspects of the project. With the release of Chef Infra 16 approaching fast, we’ve started getting Cinc-Client 16 builds ready. There’s also been significant work on our Cinc-Workstation pipeline, which now outputs artifacts of all but Windows builds, and those are in progress too.
April 3, 2020
Cooking with Cinc
So what’s cooking? As part of a private project I’m looking to deploy a Goiardi server, and what better way to do so than with Cinc Client? My first stop was, as always, the Chef Supermarket, where one can find excellent cookbooks to feed into Cinc. There I found this cookbook by Matt Whiteley. It’s a little bit dated, but that’s an easy issue to solve; We’ll update it! The new trend in community cookbooks is to write ‘resource cookbooks’, that is cookbooks that define custom resources and libraries but no recipes.
January 28, 2020
Cinc Client is live
The Cinc project is proud to announce the initial release of Cinc Client It’s been a long time coming, but the Cinc team is finally ready to announce it’s first official release of Cinc Client for Linux. While we have been distributing it for some time, it came with all kinds of disclaimers about compliance with Chef Software’s policy on trademarks. No longer! Chef Software has reviewed Cinc Client and deemed it compliant with it’s policy as reported on Chef’s Community Slack.
December 4, 2019