Did you know that CFEngine can simply warn about something not being in the desired state? Traditionally with CFEngine, you define your desired state and CFEngine works towards making that happen. Sometimes you might not want CFEngine to take action and instead warn that a given promise wants to …
Who cares about that promise? Today, I want to highlight one of the lightweight knowledge management features in CFEngine. That is, Promisees, also known as Stakeholders. Promisees are references to things that might care about a specific promise. And they can be attached to any promise. Let’s …
Did you know CFEngine has Macros? They were first introduced in CFEngine 3.7 (back in 2015), and more have been introduced since then. Macros are convenient for preventing the parsing of a section of the policy. It is handy for protecting older binaries from getting tripped up on newer syntax the …
Ever want to manage subvalues in a configuration file? In episode 39 we talk about using field_edits in edit_line bundles. Cody and Craig join Nick as he prototypes and iterates on some policy showing how to manage subvalues in KEY = quoted values. A question raised during one of our recent post …
Do you know how to quickly see what variables and classes are defined? Often, while developing CFEngine policy it’s convenient to emit a variable value or a report based on the presence of a class. For example: bundle agent main { reports: "Unqualified hostname = …
Ever want to get some data into CFEngine? Have you heard about the def.json Augments file?1 Augments are JSON data files that allow you to define classes and variables very early during agent initialization, before policy. Augments are practical in a variety of ways. Perhaps most notably for …
Let’s talk about tags and how they can be useful for Inventory and Reporting. If you have been following along with the Feature Friday series you already heard about using tags to find currently defined classes, variables and bundles, but they are also very useful for reporting. In CFEngine …
Did you know the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF) ships with a host info report? That’s right, you can simply run cf-agent --bundlesequence host_info_report and a report will be generated. command cf-agent --bundlesequence host_info_report output R: Host info report generated and available …
Did you know bundles can have tags too? That’s right! You can tag a bundle by defining tags as a meta promise on a bundle. For example: bundle agent example_bundle_tag { meta: "tags" slist => { "tag_1", "tag_2" }; } You’ve likely encountered bundles tagged with …
Did you know you can find variables by name and tag? Like the ability to find currently defined classes (as described in Feature Friday #13: classesmatching()) that match a name or tag, you can find variables by name and tag. It’s a nifty capability. variablesmatching() returns a list of …
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