With another year behind us, we take a look back at what happened with CFEngine in 2024.
Webinars: ‘The agent is in’ We are 3 years in to our webinar series, ‘The agent is in’, and the show had, as expected, 12 new episodes. You can find all the recordings, and the registration link, at cfengine.com/webinars. Additional show notes are also available on our blog.
Module Mondays and Feature Fridays Nick and Craig have been writing regularly throughout the year about their favorite features and modules. You can find these posts on our blog:
For the final post in the Feature Friday series I am here to tell you about something I use nearly hourly, ob-cfengine3 which extends Emacs Org Babel for executing CFEngine policy.
ob-cfengine3 has been around for a little over seven years now and it has saved me countless hours, seconds at a time. At it’s core it let’s you type a snippet of policy and execute it directly in your document, sort of like Jupyter.
Join Cody and Nick for a Christmas Special showcasing the new Audit Log in Mission Portal for CFEngine 3.25.
Nick walked through the new Audit Log demonstrating how actions in Mission Portal are tracked and available for review. He also took a quick look at changes to the global search and taking some questions of air from a few attendees.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
Do you enjoy escaping quotes inside strings? I sure don’t, and I really appreciate the flexibility CFEngine provides with 3 different quoting characters (", ', ` ). Let’s take a look.
This came up in the post show discussion for The agent is in, episode 39.
If you have a string that contains double quotes you might see it written with escaped quotes like this:
CFEngine works by defining a desired state for a given context and converging towards that goal. Given there is no fixed starting point and that the current context might change wildly it can be challenging to succinctly answer the question “What would CFEngine do?”.
In Feature Friday #22: Don’t fix, just warn we saw how an individual promise could be made to warn instead of trying to automatically converge towards the desired state, a granular --dry-run mode. This time, let’s take a look at the --simulate option of cf-agent.
Implicit list iteration in CFEngine is quite a unique and novel feature. Today we look at a practice example showing how lists can improve the readability and maintainability of your policy.
A novel feature in CFEngine is how a list variable is iterated when referenced as a scalar ($(variable)).
Let’s take a look at a contrived example. Here we see a list of strings (slist) defined as toys and we have a single reports promise to emit toys we want to play with.
We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.21.6 and 3.24.1! These patch releases contain bug fixes and dependency updates.
Changes In 3.24.1, Mission Portal has one new feature, requested by our users, which we’d like to highlight - When logging in to the CFEngine Enterprise web UI, Mission Portal, we now support 2FA using a time-based one time password (TOTP). Aside from this, these are patch releases which mainly focus on bugfixes, not new features.
Recently we had a Fireside Chat with long-time contributor and CFEngine Champion Bas Van der Vlies. During that talk he mentioned a Build module he developed: promise-type-docker-compose.
For this month’s Module Monday post I thought I would take this promise type for a spin alongside the Docker Compose Quickstart tutorial.
Setup For this blog I brought up a libvirt vagrant VM with Debian 12 and installed the latest LTS (3.24.0) with cf-remote. To install docker I follow the instructions at Install Docker Engine. I was using Debian 12 “bookworm” and found that the default packages docker.io and docker-compose are rather old and were not compatible with the promise-type-docker-compose module. Additionally, the module relies on the jq utility, so I install that as well. I may write policy some time to take care of these dependencies but especially the Docker Engine install involves quite a few steps so will leave that for another time.
CFEngine build modules are great for quickly integrating 3rd party policy into your policy set. Module input (not to be confused with inputs in body common control or body file control which are the list of policy files to load) allows you to define values that apply for a particular module as it’s integrated into your policy set.
Let’s take a look at a case of extending a module to support input.
Nick and Cody celebrate Thanksgiving with a holiday special reviewing some policy related questions Nick recently received.
Get the list of all network interfaces present default:sys.interfaces only contains configured interfaces, not configured interfaces.
default:sys.interfaces_data at least for Linux systems, this variable contains much more information.
/tmp/getindices-sys.interfaces_data.cf bundle agent __main__ { vars: "sys_interfaces_data_keys" slist => getindices( "sys.interfaces_data" ); reports: "$(sys_interfaces_data_keys)"; } command cf-agent --no-lock --log-level info --file /tmp/getindices-sys.interfaces_data.cf output R: lo R: enx0892048803e7 R: enx5cff35c6864b R: wlp0s20f3 R: virbr0 R: docker0 R: br-a7d465b9949b R: vboxnet0 R: tun0 cf-promises can be very useful for reviewing the first order variables that are defined using the --show-vars option.
