Effortless: Using chef client with chocolatey resource fails

Description

I am trying to use the Effortless pattern to create a workstation cookbook for my Windows 10 machines. I am using the newly merged chef/scaffolding-chef-infra package which has support for Windows now.

The package only installs Chocolatey and then uses the chocolatey_package resource to install two applications:

1. Visual Studio Code
2. Firefox

When Habitat runs the package, Chocolatey is installed correctly and indeed the chocolatey_resource runs, but the following errors are thrown.

workstation.default hook[init]:(HK):     Failures
workstation.default hook[init]:(HK):      - vscode (exited 1) - vscode not installed. An error occurred during installation:
workstation.default hook[init]:(HK):      Item has already been added. Key in dictionary: 'Path'  Key being added: 'PATH'
workstation.default hook[init]:(HK):     STDERR:
workstation.default hook[init]:(HK):     ---- End output of C:\ProgramData\chocolatey/bin/choco.exe install -y vscode ----
workstation.default hook[init]:(HK):     Ran C:\ProgramData\chocolatey/bin/choco.exe install -y vscode returned 1

Indeed the commands that have failed work correctly when run as is in an elevated PowerShell window:

In case the text in the image is too small to see the error is:

I did think that something strange was happening when chef-client was run in the bundled PowerSHell core, however I have installed PSCore on the machine and run the same commands and no errors are thrown.

I have seen something like this a few years ago when I wrote POSHChef. It was down to the way in which items are deserialised. If you use the built in PowerShell cmdlet ConvertFrom-JSON in which "Path" and "PATH" are both valid elements in JSON this same error will be thrown.

However if the [System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer]::DeserializeObject() is used then "Path" and "PATH" can be made to be the same thing, although it will not be merged. (https://github.com/POSHChef/POSHChef/blob/master/functions/Exported/ConvertFrom-JSONtoHashtable.ps1).

If VSCode (or any app) is installed manually then the chocolatey_resource correctly detects that the app is installed.

Chef Version

This is being installed into the package using stuartpreston/chef-client package as is version 14.11.21`.

Platform Version

Windows: 10 1903
Habitat: 0.82.0

Replication

To replicate this issue please download by my repo at https://github.com/russellseymour/effortless and build the habitat package.

Then on a Windows 10 machine (use a local one or one in Azure for example):

• Install Habitat
• Run a service
• Habitat install the built package
• Load the service

After the package has initialised it will run chef-client and the issues will be seen as above.

When I first ran this I was only installing Visual Studio Code so thought that it might be something to do with that package. To test this I added another one and it failed as well (as seen above). To try and fix VSCode I added /DontAddToPath as a paramater option to Chocolatey but this had no effect either.

Stacktrace

Stack trace is in a Gist - https://gist.github.com/russellseymour/55d71343c5d34cd6f891af37886df5ed

Start by building the Habitat package from the linked replication repository and inspect the chef-client initialization that invokes the chocolatey_package resource. Compare that execution with the successful elevated PowerShell commands; done means the package installs Visual Studio Code and Firefox without the duplicate Path/PATH error.