Knife tip

If you want to list the version of chef that is installed on all machines, you can do so with knife.

knife search 'name:foobar' -a chef_packages.chef.version
1 items found
foobar:
  chef_packages.chef.version: 12.21.3

For me, this is helpful when cookbooks have specific cookbook requirements in their metadata.rb, and you want to know if you can run it.

metadata.rb

chef_version '>= 12.17.0'
chef_version '< 13.0.0'