Supported platforms

Support definitions

Certification tiers

Validated & Supported

These platforms are fully tested on every release. These platforms run through the complete Chef automated test suite in CI/CD before each release.

Supported (Untested)

These platforms are fully supported, but not tested in our CI/CD pipelines. Chef stands behind these platforms and will address any reported bugs.

User Reported

These platforms are validated by users. Support is provided on a best-effort basis.

Installer types

Native

Chef is installed using the platform’s native package manager—MSI on Windows, DEB on Debian/Ubuntu, RPM on RHEL/SUSE, PKG on macOS.

Habitat

Chef is installed and run using Chef Habitat commands (hab pkg install) or by extracting a Habitat artifact (.hart or .tar.gz). Used for platforms where a native package isn’t available or where a self-contained runtime is preferred.

Agent and agentless modes

Agent

Agent-based mode includes all software that runs directly on the managed node:

• Chef Infra Client
• Chef InSpec
• Chef Habitat supervisor
• Chef 360 skills running in agent mode, including Courier job execution and Node Management

Agentless

Agentless mode includes all software that manages a node remotely without an agent present on the node:

• Chef Infra Client agentless mode (formerly Target Mode)—connects using SSH (Linux) or WinRM/SSH (Windows)
• Chef InSpec (remote scanning)
• Chef 360 Courier agentless job execution

Chef software is supported on the operating systems (platforms) listed below. To see which versions of our software we currently support, see the Supported Versions page.

Platforms

The sections below list the platforms that Chef Software supports.

Chef Automate

Commercial support

Commercial support for the Chef Automate is available for platforms that use:

• a Linux kernel version of 3.2 or greater
• systemd as the init system
• useradd
• curl or wget

Chef Automate HA

Commercial support

See the Chef Automate HA supported platforms documentation for a list of supported platforms for Chef Automate HA.

Chef Backend

Commercial support

The following table lists the commercially supported platforms for Chef Backend, which is the high-availability solution for Chef Infra Server.

Derived platforms

Chef Infra Client

See the Chef Infra Client supported platforms documentation for the full list of supported platforms, certification tiers, and installer types.

Chef Infra Server

Commercial support

The following table lists the commercially supported platforms for Chef Infra Server:

Chef InSpec

See the Chef InSpec documentation.

Chef Workstation

Commercial support

Chef Workstation is supported on the following platforms.

• Chef Workstation 26.1
• Chef Workstation 26.0
• Chef Workstation 25.x

Derived platforms

Chef Workstation 25 supports the following derived platforms and versions.

Platform end-of-life policy

Chef’s products on particular platforms and versions reach end-of-life on the same date as the vendor EOL milestone for that operating system. Because different vendors use different terminology, the following table clarifies when Chef products are end-of-life according to those vendors’ terms.

At Chef’s option, additional support may be provided to customers beyond the vendor end-of-life in the above table. As such, the following table indicates upcoming product end-of-life dates for particular platforms. On the Chef end-of-life date, Chef discontinues building software for that platform and version.