Note: this blog post was updated January 29th, 2026 Here comes a profoundly belated blog post on a behavior change. Better late than never. Due to various bugs with the glob engine on Windows, we decided to rewrite it in CFEngine 3.24.0. Not only does the new glob engine resolve these bugs on …
The MPF or Masterfiles Policy Framework is intended to provide a stable base policy for installations and upgrades, and is used by both CFEngine Enterprise and CFEngine community. When you create a new cfbs project with cfbs init one of the questions is related to the MPF: Do you wish to build on …
Ever tried to wrangle a fleet of servers with just a text file? Nick shows how CFEngine can take advantage of genders for classification. In this episode, Nick dives into the configuration file, /etc/genders. Originally developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and currently maintained by …
When writing CFEngine policy we create files ending in the .cf extension but this alone won’t cause the policy to be parsed and evaluated. By default cf-agent runs ${sys.inputdir}/promises.cf. For a non-privileged user running cf-agent this will be in their $HOME directory: command cf-promises …
For the final post in the Feature Friday series I am here to tell you about something I use nearly hourly, ob-cfengine3 which extends Emacs Org Babel for executing CFEngine policy. ob-cfengine3 has been around for a little over seven years now and it has saved me countless hours, seconds at a time. …
Do you enjoy escaping quotes inside strings? I sure don’t, and I really appreciate the flexibility CFEngine provides with 3 different quoting characters (", ', ` ). Let’s take a look. This came up in the post show discussion for The agent is in, episode 39. If you have a string that …
CFEngine works by defining a desired state for a given context and converging towards that goal. Given there is no fixed starting point and that the current context might change wildly it can be challenging to succinctly answer the question “What would CFEngine do?”. In Feature Friday …
Recently we had a Fireside Chat with long-time contributor and CFEngine Champion Bas Van der Vlies. During that talk he mentioned a Build module he developed: promise-type-docker-compose. For this month’s Module Monday post I thought I would take this promise type for a spin alongside the …
Nick and Cody celebrate Thanksgiving with a holiday special reviewing some policy related questions Nick recently received. Get the list of all network interfaces present default:sys.interfaces only contains configured interfaces, not configured interfaces. default:sys.interfaces_data at least for …
Ever need to make a decision based on the version of something? The version_compare() function might be useful for you.1 Over time, software changes and features are added and removed. Sometimes, we need to make a decision based on versions. For example, the Include directive in ssh_config was …
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