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Getting Ready for Chef + PowerShell DSC

Today we’d like to share the Supermarket debut of the PowerShell DSC cookbook for Chef, an early preview of Chef integration with PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) on Windows. This cookbook allows you to author recipes using any DSC resources available on your system, seamlessly surfacing them as Chef resources you can use in your cookbooks. Integration at this level can greatly expand the universe of manageable configuration points and applications for Windows Chef users.

For detailed requirements on using this prototype cookbook, please visit the README. The prototype is just the start on our journey to delivering fully realized integration of DSC with Chef which we’re working on now.

Now stepping back a bit, we actually gave a peek into our latest DSC thinking at July’s Seattle Chef Meetup, which was focused on Chef + DSC. Our discussion was kicked off by Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Jeffrey Snover, the inventor of PowerShell; his introduction set the stage for our demonstration of how Chef and DSC can work together. We also shared the DSC cookbook source code and walked through some of our thinking about making the integration between Chef and DSC both useful and usable.

We’re still working on the exact shape and implementation of DSC integration, so treat this cookbook as an evaluation release for providing feedback to the community. Here’s what’s next on the path toward comprehensive integration:

  • We’ve submitted this Request For Comments (RFC) pull request on Github as the forum for community feedback — please use it to post your suggestions or questions
  • As we work through the details of the integration in the RFC, we’ll make implementation progress in a branch of the Chef project repository where users comfortable with Github can test out the latest changes.
  • As the implementation converges, we’ll provide release candidate Omnibus packages for anyone not consuming Chef straight from the repository

We’re looking forward to learning more about how you’d like to use DSC with Chef, so please share your thoughts via the RFC. We can’t wait to deliver the power of DSC in Chef to the community.

Adam Edwards

Former Chef Employee