We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.15.6 and 3.18.2! These releases mainly contain bug fixes and dependency updates.
What’s new
Some smaller features and improvements were added to 3.18.2. Most of these are centered around newer functionality, such as compliance reports.
Compliance report widgets and improved UI
Compliance reports are one of our most powerful report types, allowing you to compile all your security and compliance requirements into one checklist, and easily see exactly how many hosts are failing and passing each check. These reports can now be turned into widgets on your Mission Portal dashboard:
By clicking on “Open full report” you’ll see that the interface has been updated and simplified a bit:
And by clicking the results of an individual check, you can quickly see which hosts are passing and failing, the relevant inventory attribute, and filter for only one or the other:
New add widget menu
As we’ve been working on the compliance report widget, we wanted to improve the user experience of adding new widgets as well. The new menu makes a clear distinction between creating new and reusing existing widgets, and also adds helpful visuals and descriptions to ensure finding the right widget is as easy as possible:
(This screenshot shows the dark mode UI, which we are continuously improving, but all of the smaller changes would be too many to list here).
Faster inventory refresh and host specific data update
Thanks to a new component, cf-reactor, more things are now handled in an event-based manner.
This means that when you change host specific data (CMDB), this will be written to file immediately and ready for the host to fetch.
Similarly, when collecting reports from a host, the refresh of inventory information on that host in the database is also performed immediately.
The end result of this is that you don’t have to wait for one or multiple agent runs for these things to happen.
You can now change a variable on the host info page, click the play button to trigger an agent run, and you will see the updated variable reported back from the host.
For more information on how cf-reactor reacts to events and synchronizes data between PostgreSQL and files, see our developer blog post:
https://cfengine.com/blog/2022/postgresql-to-json-files-sync/
Changelogs
As always, you can see a full list of changes and improvements in our changelogs:
- 3.15.6 Changelog for CFEngine Community
- 3.15.6 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise
- 3.15.6 Changelog for Masterfiles Policy Framework
- 3.18.2 Changelog for CFEngine Community
- 3.18.2 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise
- 3.18.2 Changelog for Masterfiles Policy Framework
Please note that the Enterprise changelogs contain only changes specific to enterprise. To get a full overview of all changes in a version, read all 3 changelogs.
Dependency updates
The following dependencies were updated, see respective project websites for more information about the changes in those projects.
| CFEngine version | 3.15.5 | 3.15.6 | 3.18.1 | 3.18.2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 2.4.51 | 2.4.53 | 2.4.51 | 2.4.53 |
| Git | 2.33.1 | 2.36.1 | 2.33.1 | 2.36.1 |
| libcurl | 7.79.1 | 7.83.1 | 7.79.1 | 7.83.1 |
| OpenLDAP | 2.4.58 | 2.4.58 | 2.6.0 | 2.6.1 |
| PHP | 7.4.25 | 7.4.29 | 8.0.12 | 8.0.19 |
| PostgreSQL | 12.8 | 12.11 | 13.4 | 13.7 |
| rsync | 3.2.3 | 3.2.4 | 3.2.3 | 3.2.4 |
| zlib | 1.2.11 | 1.2.12 | 1.2.11 | 1.2.12 |
Thank you to all the developers and maintainers of Open Source Software which make CFEngine possible!
Downloads
CFEngine Enterprise is free for up to 25 hosts, click here to go to the download pages with new packages.
Since version 3.18.2 is currently the latest available LTS release, it will be the default version picked by cf-remote and the Quick install script.
If you are using cf-remote, you can target versions like this:
cf-remote --version 3.15.6 listcf-remote --version 3.18.2 listVersion selection works for list, download, and install commands.
Read more about cf-remote here.
Contributions
We encourage all of our users to get involved in the community and contribute. Feel free to use one of the following channels:
- Explore CFEngine Build for modules made by the CFEngine team and community, and share your own modules
- Ask for help, share an idea, or start a discussion on GitHub Discussions
- Submit a bug report or feature request in our issue tracker
- Look through our curated list of issues for new contributors
- Browse the code or submit a pull request through GitHub
- Improve the documentation by fixing typos, adding examples, or explaining things you found difficult
