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How do you deal with config files that need different settings based on various services that are running on a host and cooperate with other teams? It’s a common question, and it came up on in #cfengine on libera.chat recently.
The issue is that team A might be working on package A, which requires some environment variables set. But team B might be working on a totally different thing – and want to achieve the same thing. I hoped to give them a bit of ’library’ code to take care of it, rather than have them touch a centralized environment-setting policy file.
At SURFsara we use CFEngine on our National Compute Cluster (LISA) and other systems as our configuration management tool. With the release of CFEngine 3.12 I want to highlight 2 new features, namely:
missing_ok multiple augments We use these 2 new features heavily in our framework in combination with my open source library cf_surfsara_lib. This library aims to be a central repository for configuring services, eg: ssh. For configuring the services we use JSON as data format and it is easily to override the default values via JSON. Pre CFEngine 3.12 there is only one strategy possible:
Authored by Brian Bennett of Digital Elf
I’ve been working a lot with CFEngine newbies. CFEngine has been described as flour, eggs, milk and butter. All the ingredients needed to make a cake. Getting the new CFEngine user to recognize, then become excited about the possibilities that CFEngine provides they are now faced with the question of “What next?”
Indeed, anybody can throw some flour, eggs, milk and butter into a bowl, mix and bake it. But will it taste good?
