# habitat-sh/habitat

Modern applications with built-in automation

Repository: https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/habitat-sh-habitat
Homepage: https://www.habitat.sh
Language: Rust
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: automation, configuration-management, distributed-systems, containers, rust, package-manager, package-management, choreographer
Last push: 2026-08-26T04:32:51+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 91/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 76, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4121, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 83, "gap_med": 51, "n_releases_24m": 8}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 2750, forks 318 (observed 2026-08-28T04:07:17.878140+00:00)

## What it is
Chef Habitat is an open-source application automation framework that packages applications with their dependencies and built-in automation into platform-independent artifacts (.HART files). It provides a supervisor for deploying, updating, scaling, and managing those applications across any environment, including containers and Kubernetes.

## Use cases
- package my app with all its dependencies into a portable artifact
- automate deployment and update strategies for my services
- build the same artifact once and run it in dev, staging, and prod
- export my application as a Docker container or Kubernetes deployment
- handle service discovery and dynamic service bindings between apps
- define build, install, and run behavior as code in a plan
- manage rolling updates and failure handling for distributed services

## When to choose
- you want immutable, platform-independent application packages with built-in runtime automation
- you need consistent deployments across bare metal, VMs, containers, and Kubernetes
- you want update strategies, service bindings, and clustering handled by the runtime supervisor
- your team uses Chef tooling and wants application-level automation alongside infrastructure automation

## When to avoid
- you only need a simple package manager or container image builder without runtime supervision
- your stack is already standardized on Kubernetes-native tooling like Helm and operators
- you want a lightweight tool with a large active community - Habitat's ecosystem is smaller than mainstream alternatives
- you need GUI-based configuration management rather than plan-based automation

## Facets
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: active
- function: package-manager, configuration-management, deployment, build-tool, container-runtime, developer-tools
- domain: cloud-computing, developer-tools, microservices
- platform: windows, cross-platform, cli
- tags: application-packaging, hart-artifacts, service-discovery, update-strategies, chef, rust, supervisor, immutable-artifacts, devops, automation, containers, linux, macos, docker, kubernetes

## Member repositories
- habitat-sh/habitat (main) score 91

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:17.878140+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T08:18:57.553771+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat (fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:17.878140+00:00, sha 92cbc14ec871)
  - homepage: https://www.habitat.sh (fetched 2026-08-29T09:57:02.438678+00:00, sha 401283fcffed)
  - site_page: https://docs.chef.io (fetched 2026-08-29T09:57:02.448162+00:00, sha c045f99ebfe1)
  - site_page: https://docs.chef.io/habitat (fetched 2026-08-29T09:57:02.450201+00:00, sha 6a5566fdad5e)
  - site_page: https://docs.chef.io/habitat/install_habitat (fetched 2026-08-29T09:57:02.455476+00:00, sha 6bd3a012b9a5)
  - site_page: https://docs.chef.io/habitat/builder_overview (fetched 2026-08-29T09:57:02.457385+00:00, sha ed8edb33f229)
  - site_page: https://www.chef.io/how-to-buy (fetched 2026-08-29T09:57:02.459058+00:00, sha 1b60fb194ced)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.