We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.11.0 Beta (non-LTS) is now ready. Thanks to everyone for all of the contributions! Please test extensively and submit bug reports. 3.11.x introduces some new features and deprecates some underutilized functionality. Please note that 3.11.0 will be a non-LTS release, which means that it will be maintained only for 6 months from the release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers (but Enterprise packages will be available). Looking at the CFEngine release schedule, we can see:
We’re happy to announce maintenance releases for both supported CFEngine release branches today! Being maintenance (aka patch) releases, the goal is to increase stability and reliability for CFEngine users and enable a safe upgrade-path. As such, the releases primarily include bugfixes and low-risk changes that do not impact the compatibility between previous patch releases. Looking at the CFEngine release schedule, we can see that
3.7 LTS is maintained (and supported for Enterprise customers) until July 17th 2018 3.9 non-LTS is no longer maintained 3.10 LTS is maintained (and supported for Enterprise customers) until December 27th 2019 If you are planning to contribute features to the next feature release (thank you!), please note that we would need the pull requests ready for merging by early-April in order to have time to incorporate them into 3.11. If you are planning to contribute fixes to 3.10 LTS please note that we would need the pull requests ready for merging by early-May in order to have time to incorporate them into 3.10.2 LTS.
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.10.0 LTS now is released! One of the key advantages of CFEngine is its unparalleled performance, and this has received further attention in 3.10.0! A big thanks to everyone testing the 3.10.0 beta release! Being an LTS release, 3.10 will be supported until December 2019. If you are using the previous LTS, 3.7, you will also benefit from all the new features, improvements and testing of all 3.8 and 3.9 releases, which you can read more about in the CFEngine 3.8.0 and 3.9.0 release posts.
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.10.0 LTS beta is now ready for testing! The established CFEngine release schedule shows that the 3.10.0 final version is due in December 2016, so it is time to test and fix any remaining issues! Being an LTS release, 3.10 will be supported until December 2019.
New variable expansion engine A high-demand improvement included in the 3.10 beta relates to speeding up variable expansion over large data structures. This means that working with large JSON-files or nested “classic” arrays is now much more efficient. We can let the numbers speak for themselves. In this simple test, we are using a JSON file with about 2 KB of size (locations.json
We’re happy to announce maintenance releases for both supported CFEngine release branches today! Being maintenance (aka patch) releases, the goal is to increase stability and reliability for CFEngine users and enable a safe upgrade-path. As such, the releases primarily include bugfixes and low-risk changes that do not impact the compatibility between previous patch releases. Looking at the CFEngine release schedule, we can see that
3.6 and 3.8 are no longer maintained. If you are still on any of these versions, please consider upgrading. 3.7 LTS is maintained (and supported for Enterprise customers) until July 17th 2018 3.9 non-LTS is maintained until December 2016 For CFEngine Enterprise customers, the only supported release today is 3.7. The next supported release will be 3.10 LTS due end of 2016, which will be supported through the end of 2019. If you are planning to contribute improvements to 3.10 (thank you!), please note that we would need the pull requests ready for merging by mid-September in order to have time to incorporate them into 3.10.
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.9.0 non-LTS now is released! A big thanks to everyone testing the 3.9.0 beta release! Please note that this is a non-LTS release, which means that it is maintained for 6 months from the release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers (but packages are available for testing). The established CFEngine release schedule gives an overview over the release timelines for all releases.
Running remote bundles CFEngine 3.9 introduces a simple way to trigger bundles to run remotely by using cf-runagent –remote-bundles to ask a remote cf-serverd to run a given set of bundles. For example:
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.9.0 non-LTS beta is now ready for testing! The established CFEngine release schedule shows that the 3.9.0 final version is due in June 2016, so it’s time to test and fix any remaining issues. Please note that this is a non-LTS release, which means that it is maintained for 6 months from the release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers, but packages are available for testing.
We’re happy to announce maintenance releases for all supported CFEngine release branches today! Being maintenance (aka patch) releases, the goal is to increase stability and reliability for CFEngine users and enable a safe upgrade-path. As such, the releases primarily include bugfixes and low-risk changes that do not impact the compatibility between previous patch releases. Looking at the CFEngine release schedule, we can see that
3.7 LTS is maintained until July 17th 2018 3.6 is maintained until July 17th 2016 (released before CFEngine incorporated the LTS model) 3.8 (being a non-LTS release) is maintained until 3.9.0 is released For CFEngine Enterprise customers, the supported releases as of today are 3.7 and 3.6. If you are on 3.6, it is a good time to prepare for an upgrade to 3.7, as the next supported minor release will be 3.10 LTS due end of 2016. If you are planning to contribute improvements to 3.9 (thank you!), please note that we would need the pull requests by beginning of April in order to have time to incorporate them into 3.9.
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.8.1 non-LTS now is released! Please note that this is a non-LTS release, which means that it is maintained for 6 months from the minor version’s (3.8.0 in this case) release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers (but packages are available for testing). The established CFEngine release schedule gives an overview over the release timelines for all releases.
Changes and improvements The def.json feature for overriding CFEngine default configuration was introduced in 3.7 and has since seen significant adoption. The main goal of this feature is to make upgrades easier, as it makes the difference between vanilla masterfiles and user masterfiles much easier to manage. However, several users have reported unexpected behaviour with the feature, because some of the variables in def.json were not parsed early enough to be taken into account by CFEngine. This triggered several discussions, also by the CFEngine Community Advisory Board. A new design has been introduced to parse def.json natively in C, which should resolve this issue. If you had this problem, please let us know if it is resolved in 3.8.1! All bundled dependencies have been upgraded to their latest version to bring in the latest security, performance and reliability improvements. All 3.8.1 CFEngine installations include these key dependencies, among others: OpenSSL 1.0.2e, PCRE 8.38, libxml2 2.9.3, OpenLDAP 2.4.43, libcurl 7.46.0, LMDB 0.9.17. CFEngine Enterprise Policy Servers also have upgraded dependencies and include PHP 5.6.17, Redis 3.0.6, git 2.6.5. OpenSSL recently published a security advisory, but CFEngine is not affected because neither DH nor DHE key exchange can be used by CFEngine. It is probably a good idea to check other products you use, though. Please see the Community Change Log and Enterprise Change Log for a detailed list of new features and changes. We highly appreciate community contributors for pull requests that made it in time for 3.8.1!
UPDATE, 2016-02-22: After feedback from CFEngine users and several discussions around a variable expansion performance issue, we decided to put this expansion issue higher on the priority list for 3.9. We still plan to address some high-impact logging issues for 3.9, most notably adding a line-level email-filtering feature. With CFEngine 3.8 released on target in December, and we’ve entered 2016 it’s time to look ahead to CFEngine 3.9! According to the CFEngine release schedule, 3.9 will be a non-LTS release and is due for June 2016. If you’re considering to contribute a major change or feature to CFEngine (thank you!) and would like to see it in 3.9, please note that we have a beta period for one month, so your pull request should be ready (i.e. reviewed and any adjustments made) in early April in order to make it. We’d also like to share that logging will be the release theme for 3.9!
