Cinc Server: forking for the long haul

In November 2025, Progress announced that the open-source Chef Infra Server is being retired in favor of the Chef 360 platform. The community edition will receive no new code, features, or security fixes after October 2026, and will reach formal end-of-life in November 2026. Existing repositories will go read-only at that point.

This is similar in spirit to the upstream move to Habitat-only Workstation builds that triggered our Cinc Workstation fork earlier this year. And, like with Workstation, the Cinc Project intends to keep producing omnibus binary builds of Cinc Server for the foreseeable future — Chef 360 is Progress’s proprietary product, not something we’re going to chase.

Our plan

There are two parallel tracks:

1. Keep shipping 15.x for as long as it makes sense. We’ll continue to rebuild any 15.x releases Progress produces until their EOL in November 2026. Existing users on the 15.x line don’t need to change anything.

2. In parallel, start work on a proper fork. We’ve created a new consolidated repository at gitlab.com/cinc-project/distribution/cinc-server and are doing the early work to make Cinc Server self-sufficient. The first independent release will be Cinc Server 16.0.0, targeted to land around the upstream EOL. The current WIP can be followed on merge request !1.

The fork is intended to keep Cinc Server in maintenance mode. No major feature changes are planned. We’ll cherry-pick upstream commits that benefit the project for as long as the Chef GitHub repos remain readable, and we’ll continue to do the boring-but-important work after that: security updates, platform support, dependency upgrades.

What’s already in flight

A fair amount of the groundwork is already done in the new repository:

• The consolidated cinc-server repo now contains the service source (oc_erchef, bookshelf, oc_bifrost, oc-id, chef-server-ctl), the omnibus build configuration, integration tests, and CI pipeline — all in one place
• Erlang dependencies that previously lived under github.com/chef/ are being mirrored to gitlab.com/cinc-project/upstream/ and pinned to known-good commits, so we don’t lose the ability to build when those repos go read-only
• Gecode 6.x compatibility patches and libffi / runit updates for Enterprise Linux 10 and Debian 13 are already merged
• Telemetry to Progress Chef can be disabled; it will be removed entirely post-fork
• Initial version is set to 16.0.0; CI is being restructured for the fork workflow

The maintenance plan — including the full list of upstream dependencies we’re mirroring, our security update policy, and the planned Ruby / PostgreSQL / Erlang upgrade roadmap — is published in the repository: CINC_MAINTENANCE_PLAN.md.

What this means if you run Cinc Server today

In short: nothing changes immediately, and your migration plan is “keep running Cinc Server.”

• Your existing 15.x installs keep getting rebuilds for the rest of 2026
• Cookbooks, knife configurations, chef-server-ctl automation — all continue to work unchanged
• When 16.0.0 lands, it will be a drop-in continuation of the 15.x line. There are no planned breaking changes at the fork point
• Configuration paths (/etc/cinc-project/cinc-server.rb) and binary names (cinc-server-ctl) stay the same

If you’ve been considering Chef 360, that’s between you and Progress; this post isn’t about that. But if you’d rather not switch to a commercial platform, Cinc Server will be there.

How to help

This is a meaningful expansion of the maintenance surface for the Cinc Project. We’d particularly welcome:

• Erlang experience — the three core services (oc_erchef, bookshelf, oc_bifrost) are battle-tested but the long tail of Erlang dependencies needs care
• Testing on more platforms — the build matrix already covers 12 platforms; expanding to ARM and more distros would be useful
• Security review — extra eyes on the upgrade plan for OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, Ruby, and Erlang/OTP versions

Come find us in #community-distros on the Chef Community Slack, or open an issue / MR on GitLab.