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Package identifiers

A Chef Habitat artifact is the binary distribution for a package built with Chef Habitat. A Chef Habitat artifact is a signed tarball with a .hart file extension. Chef Habitat artifacts are composed of a software library or application, configuration information for that software, and lifecycle hooks. They’re created from a plan file—plan.sh on Linux systems or plan.ps1 on Windows systems—and are built with Chef Habitat tools. Chef Habitat artifacts can be exported to specific formats, such as Docker images.

When referring to Chef Habitat artifacts from either Builder or the Studio, you can refer to them in two ways:

  • Fully-qualified package identifier (FQPI) - Uses four components in the following format: origin/name/version/release. For example, core/glibc/2.22/20160310192356.
  • Short package identifier - Uses two components in the following format: origin/name. For example, core/redis or core/openssl. Use the three-component form origin/name/version, such as core/redis/5.0.4, when you need a specific artifact version.

Package identifier components

origin
A name that defines a set of related Chef Habitat packages and the artifacts they generate. For example, sample, core, or company_name.
Name
The name of the application or service. For example, postgres.
Version
The version number defined by the application or service authors. For example, 3.1.1, or 20160118.
Release
The unique Chef Habitat ID for a given version based on the timestamp pattern YYYYMMDDhhmmss. For example, 20160204220358 is a Chef Habitat artifact built at 22:03:58 on February 4, 2016.

Package lookup

If the Chef Habitat artifact identifier isn’t fully qualified (has fewer than four components), and exactly one artifact is required, the missing components are assumed to be the most recent values. For example:

  • core/glibc assumes that version and release values are the latest for core/glibc.
  • core/glibc/2.22 assumes that the version of core/glibc is 2.22 and that the release is the most recent release for core/glibc/2.22.
  • core/glibc/2.22/20160310192356 refers to the specific Chef Habitat artifact 20160310192356.

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