InSpec Profile Platform Support

Use the supports setting in the inspec.yml file to specify one (or more) platforms for which a profile is targeting. The list of supported platforms may contain the following:

• Use platform-family to restrict to a specific platform family.
• Use platform-name to restrict on a specific platform name. platform-name supports asterisk (*) wildcard use.
• Use release to restrict to a specific platform version, and use together with platform-name. release supports asterisk (*) wildcard use.
• Use platform to restrict on either platform-name or platform-family.

To get a list of all valid values for platform-name and platform-family, run inspec schema platforms, which returns the supported list in JSON format.

For compatibility we support os-name and os-family. We recommend all users to change os-name to platform-name and os-family to platform-family.

With Chef InSpec 2.0, we introduced new families to help distinguish the cloud platforms. The new families can restrict the platform family to os, aws, azure or gcp.

For example, to target anything running Debian Linux, use:

name: ssh
supports:
  - platform-name: debian

To target only Ubuntu version 20.04, use:

name: ssh
supports:
  - platform-name: ubuntu
    release: 20.04

To target the entire release of Ubuntu version 20.x, use:

name: ssh
supports:
  - platform-name: ubuntu
    release: 20.*

To target the Red Hat and derivative platforms such as CentOS and Oracle Linux, use:

name: ssh
supports:
  - platform-family: redhat

To target the entire Windows 2019 platform family, including Datacenter and Core Servers, use:

name: ssh
supports:
  - platform-name: windows_server_2019*

To target anything running on Amazon AWS, use:

name: ssh
supports:
  - platform: aws

To target all of these examples in a single inspec.yml file, use:

name: ssh
supports:
  - platform-name: debian
  - platform-name: ubuntu
    release: 20.04
  - platform-family: redhat
  - platform: aws