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Download and Install the Chef Habitat CLI Tool

Below you’ll find installation instructions for each platform and their requirements. The Chef Habitat CLI is currently supported on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

From building packages to running services, everything in Chef Habitat is done through the hab command-line interface (CLI) tool. To get started using Chef Habitat, you need to download and install the hab CLI tool that corresponds to your workstation OS. hr

Chef Habitat for Linux

Chef Habitat for Linux requires a 64-bit processor with kernel 2.6.32 or later. On Linux, exporting your Chef Habitat artifact to a Docker image requires the Docker Engine supplied by Docker. Packages from distribution-specific or otherwise alternative providers are currently not supported.

Once you have downloaded the package, extract the hab binary with tar to /usr/local/bin or add its location to your PATH (e.g. tar -xvzf hab.tgz -C /usr/local/bin --strip-components 1).

Download Chef Habitat for Linux

Install Chef Habitat from the Command Line

Alternatively, you can install Chef Habitat via the command line by downloading and running the installation script:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/habitat-sh/habitat/main/components/hab/install.sh | sudo bash

Install Chef Habitat for Linux Kernel 2.x from the Command Line

Please note that support for Linux Kernel 2.x is limited. Not all core plans are available for Kernel 2.x, nor are there plans to backport all of the existing core plans to Kernel 2.x. Kernel 2.x is legacy technology by definition, and its use should be viewed as a stop-gap to provide interim solutions for old systems, as they are upgraded to more recent versions of the Linux kernel.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/habitat-sh/habitat/main/components/hab/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- -t x86_64-linux-kernel2

Chef Habitat for Mac

Requires 64-bit processor running 10.9 or later

Once you have downloaded the hab CLI, unzip it onto your machine. Unzipping to /usr/local/bin should place it on your PATH. In order to use the Chef Habitat Studio, you’ll also need to install Docker for Mac.

Download Chef Habitat for Mac

Download Docker for Mac

Install Chef Habitat Using Homebrew

Chef Habitat can also be installed with Homebrew, by running the following commands:

brew tap habitat-sh/habitat
brew install hab

Chef Habitat for Windows

Minimum Windows version supported: Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 64-bit

Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows. You can use it to easily install, configure, upgrade, and even uninstall Windows software packages. We recommend using Chocolatey for installing Chef Habitat.

Install Chef Habitat with Chocolatey, by running the following command:

choco install habitat

Install Chef Habitat using a Powershell install script

Alternatively, you can install Chef Habitat by downloading and running the installation script:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force
iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/habitat-sh/habitat/main/components/hab/install.ps1'))

Installing Habitat for Windows using the dowloaded Chef Habitat package.

Downloaded the hab CLI, unzip it onto your machine. We suggest unzipping to C:\habitat, so that the full path to Chef Habitat is similar to C:\habitat\hab-0.79.1-20190410221450-x86_64-windows. If you’ve downloaded a more recent version of Chef Habitat, you’ll see a different set of numbers following hab-. Replace the package name used in these examples with the filename you see on your computer. Next, add that folder to your PATH variable so your computer will know where to find it. Here’s how to do that with Powershell:

$env:PATH += ";C:\habitat\hab-0.79.1-20190410221450-x86_64-windows\"

To use a Docker Chef Habitat Studio as an isolated environment, you’ll also need to install Docker for Windows.

Docker for Windows requires 64-bit Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, or Education editions (1607 Anniversary Update, Build 14393 or later) with Hyper-V enabled

Download Chef Habitat for Windows

Download Docker for Windows

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