Looking for a tool to help you format your CFEngine policy? Have you heard of cffmt?
You might recall that we had a chat with the author, Miek Gieben in The agent is in - Episode 24.1 In case you missed it, cffmt is a command line tool for formatting CFEngine policy files, like gofmt for .cf files.2 Let’s take a look.
Consistent formatting can really ease reading of policy, but sometimes editors are configured differently and you can end up with inconsistently formatted policy. For example, here is a contrived policy file with some irregular formatting:
The CFEngine team celebrates 30 years of CFEngine and has a chat with Mark Burgess, the original creator and author of CFEngine.
Mark delves into the early chapters of his journey, tracing back the roots of his inspiration to science fiction sagas like Star Trek and Dr. Who, and the literary works of Isaac Asimov, Aurthur C. Clarke, and Paul Davies. Mark recalled his first computer, the fabulous, most programmable, decomposable, put back together-able, expandable thing, a BBC-b microcomputer.
Saint Patrick’s Day makes us think of the color green. Spring is coming. Plants are starting to sprout amongst the dead grass and leaves from Fall/Winter:
Earth Day is just around the corner on April 22nd.
This reminds us of our commitment to the environment and ecosystems that surround us. As we at Northern.tech state in our corporate social responsibilities:
We have set an ambitious company-objective to “Become a net-zero carbon business by the end of 2022”.
(This is a blog post to celebrate Chinese New Year for our Chinese-speaking users.) 作为年前的最后一篇文章，并延续我们的传统，我们想回顾一下CFEngine在这一年中取得的所有成就，并对新的一年我们的计画做一个简要的介绍。
For our final blog post of 2021 and continuing our tradition, we’d like to reflect on all the CFEngine accomplishments throughout the year and provide a sneak peak of what to expect in 2022.
Modernized Mission Portal UI In CFEngine Enterprise 3.18.0 LTS, released in June, we overhauled the web user interface. You can read about the changes in our blog post on the subject. We will continue to make meaningful design changes within Mission Portal next year with the goal of making it more intuitive and user friendly.
As we’ve hinted at before, 2021 will be a big year for CFEngine. In the summer, we will release CFEngine 3.18 LTS. This is the first LTS release with Compliance Reports, Custom Promise types, and all of the other improvements we’ve made over the past year.
Collaboration In addition to implementing valuable functionality for our users, we are focusing on better ways of interacting with them, and more opportunities for contribution, collaboration and sharing. The beginning of this was the introduction of GitHub Discussions - a platform where users can ask questions, submit ideas, or show off their CFEngine-related creations. One month later, in March, we launched our new website. The new website should make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for, and also has some sections with great content, such as videos, case studies, and white papers. Now, we are excited to share our plans for the rest of the year.
We are excited to announce that CFEngine is now using GitHub Discussions. GitHub Discussions is a feature of GitHub repos, and similar to Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow, and other online forums. After testing it out for a few weeks we are pleased with how it works and want to encourage all our users to try it. We hope this fuels more discussion and sharing among CFEngine users - it is easy to discover on GitHub, many of you already have GitHub users, the UI is nice, and so the barrier to entry should be very low.
2020 is nearly over, and we’d like to take a couple of minutes to reflect on our year as well as provide a sneak peek into what you can expect from us in 2021. Although it has been a year full of distractions, the CFEngine team has continued to make significant strides when it comes to product improvements and new features that help our users.
Build powerful compliance reports based on important inventory data Compliance reports are high level reports, allowing you to see how compliant your infrastructure is. Checks are run against reporting data from all of your hosts, or a filtered subset, to find how many of them meet a certain compliance requirement. They are easy to build and use, entirely from the UI, with no programming needed, but flexible and powerful, allowing you to use package version information, custom inventory from your policy or even SQL queries if you need it. Compliance reports are not limited to a one regulation or framework, like CIS or HIPAA, but allow you to build your own checklists, based on your organizations requirements and compliance goals. See Compliance Reports in this video:
In CFEngine 3.17, custom promise types were introduced. This allows you to extend policy language, managing resources which don’t have built in promise types. The implementation of custom promise types is open source, and available in both CFEngine Enterprise and CFEngine Community. To implement a new custom promise type, you need a promise module. (The promise type is what you use in policy language (the concept), while the module is the underlying implementation - can be a python script, compiled executable or similar).
We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.12.6 and 3.15.3! These releases mainly contain bug fixes and dependency updates, but in 3.15.3 there are also some new enhancements in Mission Portal. The new cf-secret binary is also included in 3.15.3 packages.
New in Mission Portal 3.15.3 Synchronizing roles between Mission Portal and Active Directory When using LDAP for authentication, Mission Portal can now automatically grant roles based on the tags received from your LDAP server (for example Active Directory). This means that new users can start using Mission Portal immediately, without having to wait for an administrator to grant the appropriate roles manually. Enable this in Mission Portal Authentication Settings:
