How to control the version of Chef that Vagrant uses to provision VMs?

Question

A current Chef recipe isn't running because of a bug in version 0.10.10. How can I upgrade the version of Chef that Vagrant uses, to 0.10.12?

I don't want to just update it for the current instance of the VM - I keep destroying and rebuilding those. Do I need to change something in the Vagrant base box, or something in my (physical) system's installation?

Answer 1

Using the Vagrant plugin vagrant-omnibus worked great for me:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus 

You can then simply configure your chef version in the Vagrantfile before doing the provisioning:

config.omnibus.chef_version = :latest 

You can also specify a specific version:

config.omnibus.chef_version = '11.6.0' 

Answer 2

Add the lines

config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => 'apt-get install build-essential ruby1.9.1-dev --no-upgrade --yes' config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "gem install chef --version 11.4.2 --no-rdoc --no-ri --conservative" 

to your Vagrantfile before your config.vm.provision :chef_solo block.

props to hauraki's comment on http://dougireton.com/blog/2012/12/23/automatically-upgrading-chef-client-on-vagrant-up/

edited to include Jason Mayfield's comment. Make sure and give him an upvote too. I added --no-upgrade to speed things up and match the --conservative on the second line. You could instead do what Jason did, and remove both the --no-upgrade and --conservative.

edited to include suggested edit by anonymous user228653