Progress Chef Infra Client is the core agent that runs locally on every node managed by Progress Chef Infra Server. It continuously enforces your desired state by translating infrastructure into code, ensuring systems remain consistent, compliant and reliable at any scale.
With Chef Infra Client 19, we are delivering one of our most impactful releases yet. This version modernizes the foundation of Infra Client, improves installation and upgrade workflows, enhances security and introduces powerful capabilities.
As Chef Infra adoption has grown, teams have consistently asked for improvements that reduce friction, especially packaging, upgrades, OS-specific behaviors and managing different client versions during transitions. Chef Infra Client 19 directly addresses these needs. This release focuses on:
Infra Client 19 is also the new Long-Term Support (LTS) release, making it the recommended version for customers planning for long-term stability.Infra Client 19 introduces several enhancements that strengthen daily operations and set the stage for future improvements.
Previous versions of Chef used an inflexible, monolithic packaging system known as Omnibus, making it difficult to run multiple versions in parallel and making new OS support challenging.
Chef Infra 19 overcomes these challenges using Chef Habitat technology, providing a better experience. Customers have the flexibility of leveraging the power of the Habitat package manager directly or the convenience of installing OS-native packages.
Native installers available in the release will include:
Support for additional operating systems and processor architectures will follow in later releases.
Some customers will need to upgrade Chef in place; others will perform fresh installs. For those upgrading in-place, Infra Client 19 introduces a new migration tool to make the switch from Omnibus-based packaging to Habitat-based packaging seamless. The tool enables:
This enables teams to adopt Infra Client 19 confidently without risk to existing workflows.
This release includes significant security improvements driven by ongoing threat modelling efforts. Updates include:
Infra Client 19 includes a wide range of enhancements across functionality, reliability, and performance:
Infra Client 19 introduces changes to packaging, dependencies and installation behaviour. Existing cookbooks and workflows remain compatible, but teams may notice differences compared to Omnibus-based versions.
We recommend using the migration tool for the smoothest upgrade experience, especially in large or mixed-version environments.
Future updates will expand platform support, bring additional security enhancements, and continue refining the Habitat-based packaging experience.
The Chef Workstation release that supports Infra Client 19 and Workstation 26 will be released in a few weeks, following the release of the Infra Client. Look forward to the release of Workstation 26 to try out these features:
More guidance, documentation and tooling improvements will be shared as the release evolves.
Chef Infra Client 19 is available now. Teams can begin installing, testing and exploring its capabilities right away.
Installation steps, migration guidance and reference documentation are available in the official Chef Infra Client 19 documentation.