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.
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. And it does work, just not in the way I expected.
Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CFEngine 3.18.0! The focus of this new version has been extensibility. It also marks an important event, the beginning of the 3.18 LTS series, which will be supported for 3 years.
Several new features have been added since the release of CFEngine 3.15 LTS, in the form of non-LTS releases. In this blog post we’ll primarily focus on what is new in 3.18, but we will also highlight some things released in 3.16 and 3.17.
We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.12.7 and 3.15.4! These releases mainly contain bug fixes and dependency updates.
Changelogs As always, you can see a full list of changes and improvements in our changelogs:
3.12.7 Changelog for CFEngine Community 3.12.7 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise 3.12.7 Changelog for Masterfiles Policy Framework 3.15.4 Changelog for CFEngine Community 3.15.4 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise 3.15.4 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.
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.
Generally speaking, CFEngine and Ansible can be used to solve the same problems, but their approaches are different. In this blog post I’d like to discuss the different approaches, their consequences, some advantages of each tool, and even using them together.
CFEngines autonomous agents CFEngine works by installing and running an agent on every host of your infrastructure. It is distributed, each CFEngine agent will evaluate its policy periodically and independently. They rely on a centralized hub for refreshing policy and reporting. Updating the policy, enforcing it, and reporting on the results are decoupled - each of these 3 steps can happen with different configurations / schedules.
cf-remote is a tool for downloading and installing/deploying CFEngine. It automates a lot of the things you have to do before CFEngine is actually installed on your infrastructure, such as provisioning cloud instances, downloading CFEngine installers, copying them to remote hosts and installing / bootstrapping. To make it as easy as possible to get started with cf-remote and CFEngine, it is now available on pypi.
Getting started Installing cf-remote is as easy as:
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.
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. In our previous blog post, we showed how to implement modules in Python. That’s great, it’s a powerful, expressive and readable programming language, however there is one drawback; installing python. Many systems don’t have python already, or have a version which is too old. So you will need to add policy to install / update Python, to make sure modules work correctly everywhere.
Several months ago I started the practice of using CFEngine Enterprise and its Mission Portal UI on a daily basis to manage the connected devices in my home. To start, I brought up an old desktop machine, cfengine-hub, to use as my hub and downloaded Enterprise, which is free for use up to 25 hosts. The next step in using best practices is to deploy policy from a version control repository. I use a local git server named git-server-zero instead of GitHub or GitLab as I like to be independent of the cloud when possible due to privacy and environmental concerns. I will use the Mission Portal Version Control Repository settings section to setup this repo as the source of policy for cfengine-hub.
