Over three years ago we introduced git and systemd custom promise types. While these are quite functional I recently needed to manage a git repository that was private and so needed a way to authenticate to a git server, in this case gitlab. Gitlab has project access tokens but we didn’t …
Did you know CFEngine can self-organize hosts into different groups? Say you have a few hosts that you want to reboot once a month. You don’t care when, but you want the hosts to self-organize and pick a date. The select_class attribute for classes type promises might be what you’re …
The prolific contributor and CFEngine Champion Bas Van der Vlies joins the team for a chat about his history and experience with CFEngine dating back to version 1.0.3. For this special Halloween edition Bas joined Cody, Craig and Nick to reflect on his journey getting into information technology …
What’s the difference between an associative array and a data container in CFEngine? CFEngine has two ways in which structured data can be used, associative arrays (sometimes called classic arrays) and data containers. Let’s take a look at a simple data structure. Here we have two data …
Within the configuration management space, people often distinguish between agent-based and agent-less approaches. In short, an agent-based solution means that you install a software agent to run in the background / periodically on the system. That software agent then makes changes to the system as …
Ever need to do some math during policy evaluation? Sometimes configuration settings are based on available resources. For example, what if you want to calculate the size of shared buffers to be 25% of your available memory? Let’s write some policy. First, we need to figure out how much memory …
Ever need to visualize the data you’re working with? storejson() to the rescue! Let’s re-visit our example for sys.os_release from Feature Friday #12: Special variables: bundle agent __main__ { reports: "My custom key 'NORTHERN_TECH_OWNER' contains …
I promised more Build modules in my previous monthly Monday module blog post: package-method-winget. And here they are: windows-capability and windows-optional-feature. Inventory Both of these modules use similar usage details to control whether to inventory and to promise the state for specific …
Ever want a custom CFEngine Agent logo? Check out agentsvg. You can find agentsvg in core/contrib/ it’s a python script that can generate CFEngine agent logos. python3 ./agentsvg.py > agent.svg python3 ./agentsvg.py --body="#f5821f" --head="#052569" > …
Did you know you can use variables in class expressions? If you are reading this, you probably are already familiar with the ability to use class expressions to restrict the context of multiple promises. For example, here we have three reports type promises, all guarded by the class expression …
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