Software quality has been a topic and an area of interest since the dawn of software itself. And as software evolved so did the techniques and approaches to assuring its high quality. Better computers providing more computing power, bigger storage and faster communication have allowed software developers to detect issues in their code sooner and faster. And so we got from getting a syntax error after two days of waiting for the box of punch cards to go through the queue of boxes and get loaded into a computer running a compiler to getting such errors from a compiler in seconds or even in real-time from the code editor.
Earlier this year, we hinted at what we were working on - a place for users to find and share reusable modules for CFEngine. Today, the CFEngine team is pleased to announce the launch of CFEngine Build:
The new website, build.cfengine.com, allows you to browse for modules, and gives you information about how to use each one of them. When you’ve found the module you were looking for, it can be downloaded and built using the command line tooling.
Still interested in running CFEngine on IoT?
Craig (Digger) shows building CFEngine Enterprise for Yacto and deploys a Raspberry Pi Zero with a sensor to measure the height of Nick’s (Doer of Things) desk.
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.
CFEngine is well suited for use in IoT environments due to it’s portability, size, and performance. There already exists a meta layer for including the CFEngine community client and Masterfiles Policy Framework in Yocto Project builds. This enables developing policy to:
ensure a service stays running track changes to important files monitor a value over time for normalcy Let’s walk through bringing up a qemu environment with CFEngine and ensure that a few basic things work: ensure the udev service stays running, tracking changes to important files like /etc/group and a look at monitoring capabilities.
Interested in running CFEngine for IoT?
Craig (Digger) shows building CFEngine for Yocto.
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.
Links Yacto Raspberry Pi Zero Connect on LinkedIn w/ Cody, Craig, or Nick All Episodes
I recently had a minor task involving changing an option - on one of our command line tools - from taking a required argument, to taking an optional argument. This should be easy they said; just change the respective option struct to take an optional argument, add a colon to the optstring, and get on with your life.
Well, it proved to be easier said than done. My initial expectation was that a solution similar to the one below should just work.
Interested writing CFEngine policy faster?
Jeff (CFEngine Community user) demonstrates his YASnippet library for CFEngine to make writing CFEngine policy significantly faster.
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.
Links Jeff Carlson’s YASnippet library for CFEngine Connect on LinkedIn w/ Cody, Craig, or Jeff Carlson All Episodes
This blog post will focus on the bash programming part of implementing a promise type. To understand what custom promise types are, and how to use them, you should read the introduction first.
To implement a custom promise type in CFEngine, you need a promise module. The module is an executable, and can be written in any language. It’s possible to write one from scratch, but to make it as easy as possible, we decided to provide libraries for common programming languages.
This tutorial focuses on how to write a promise module, implementing a new CFEngine promise type. It assumes you already know how to install promise modules and use custom promise types, as shown in the previous blog post.
Why Python? Promise modules can be written in any programming language, but there are some advantages of using python:
Readable and beginner friendly language / syntax Popular and familiar to a lot of people, also used in some CFEngine package modules Big standard library, allowing you to reuse data structures, parsers, etc.
Introduction In the CFEngine Core team, we have recently been working on a fix for our WaitForCriticalSection() function. In short, the function checks a timestamp in a chunk of (lock) data stored in a local LMDB database and if the timestamp is too old, it writes a new chunk of (lock) data with the new timestamp. However, this used to be done in separate steps - read the data from the DB and close DB, check the data and potentially write the new data into the DB.
