Cinc Workstation

Tools for authoring cookbooks, policies, and tests.

Install

Using the install script

To install the latest 26.x of Cinc Workstation:

curl -L https://omnitruck.cinc.sh/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- -P cinc-workstation -v 26

. { iwr -useb https://omnitruck.cinc.sh/install.ps1 } | iex; install -project cinc-workstation -version 26

Plain packages

Packages for all supported platforms are at downloads.cinc.sh/files/stable/cinc-workstation/.

Container image

We publish a cincproject/workstation container image on Docker Hub — the full authoring toolchain (cookstyle, chefspec, test-kitchen, knife) in one image. Useful for CI pipelines and ephemeral dev environments. See Container images for tagging scheme and usage examples.

What’s included

Cinc Workstation 26.x bundles the core Chef cookbook authoring toolchain plus the most common Test Kitchen and Knife plugins.

Core tools

• Cinc Client (cinc-client and the chef-bin toolchain)
• Cinc Auditor (cinc-auditor, the Cinc rebuild of Chef InSpec)
• Knife and a wide set of plugins (azure, ec2, google, vcenter, vsphere, vrealize, tidy, windows, …)
• Test Kitchen and plugins (azurerm, digitalocean, dokken, ec2, google, hyperv, inspec, openstack, sync, terraform, vagrant, vcenter, vra, kitchen-cinc)
• Cookstyle for cookbook linting (replaces the older Chefstyle workflow)
• ChefSpec and fauxhai-chef for unit testing
• Berkshelf for cookbook dependency management
• chef-cli for the workstation cinc-cli workflow
• A full embedded Ruby (3.4.x) and Git

Renamed binaries

Wrappers for the upstream names are installed and redirect to the Cinc binaries, so existing automation keeps working.

No longer shipped

• Chef Workstation App — upstream dropped omnibus packaging in favor of Habitat-only builds
• chef-apply — gem no longer maintained
• Chef Habitat (hab) — Cinc does not ship Habitat. On Linux x86_64 we include the Biome bio CLI as a community-maintained alternative. There is no current plan to rebuild Habitat itself; if there’s community interest, that can change.

Configuration

Cinc Workstation reads its configuration from:

• ~/.cinc-workstation on Unix-like systems
• %USERPROFILE%\.cinc-workstation on Windows

Configurations are compatible with Chef Workstation — symlink or copy your existing config.

Usage

All Cinc Workstation tools are fully compatible with their Chef Workstation counterparts; many are unmodified. Wrappers for the upstream-named binaries are installed and redirect to the Cinc binaries, so existing automation keeps working.

All upstream documentation and Chef classes apply.