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.
When working with CFEngine, it’s common to hear advice about separating data from policy. Separating data from policy allows for separation of concerns, delegation of responsibilities and integration with other tooling. Each organization is different, and a strategy that works well in one environment may not work as well in a similar environment of another organization, so CFEngine looks to provide various generic ways to leverage external data. For example, Augments (def.json) is useful for setting classes and defining variables very early during the agent execution which can be applied to the entire policy having differences based on system characteristics as well as being used for host specific data.
CFEngine is well suited for use in IoT environments due to it’s portability, size, and performance. There already exists a meta layer for including the CFEngine community client and Masterfiles Policy Framework in Yocto Project builds. This enables developing policy to:
ensure a service stays running track changes to important files monitor a value over time for normalcy Let’s walk through bringing up a qemu environment with CFEngine and ensure that a few basic things work: ensure the udev service stays running, tracking changes to important files like /etc/group and a look at monitoring capabilities.
Manually managing groups on a large infrastructure can be a tedious task, and is therefore best suited through automation software like CFEngine. Unfortunately - at time of writing - CFEngine does not have any built-in promise types for managing groups. But fear not; in CFEngine 3.17, custom promise types were introduced. This new exhilarating feature does not only allow for members of our community to make their own custom promise types, but also lets the CFEngine Core developers prototype new future promise types. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce one of our prototypes; the experimental groups promise type.
Come see what’s new in CFEngine policy management!
Herman (Product Manager) introduces and demonstrates new tooling, the CFEngine Build System (cfbs). cfbs is a command line tool to facilitate policy management and consuming modules written by others.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
Using modules, you can add custom promise types to CFEngine, to manage new resources. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce some of the first official modules, namely git and systemd promise types. They were both written by Fabio Tranchitella, who normally works on our other product, Mender.io. He decided to learn some CFEngine and within a couple of weeks he’s contributed 3 modules, showing just how easy it is to implement new promise types. Thanks, Fabio!
Interested writing CFEngine policy faster?
Jeff (CFEngine Community user) demonstrates his YASnippet library for CFEngine to make writing CFEngine policy significantly faster.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
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.
Interested in seeing promise results (KEPT, REPAIRED, NOTKEPT) overlaid on top of the policy itself?
Craig (Digger) and Nick (Doer of Things) kick off the new series, “The agent is in” and take a look at the policy analyzer in CFEngine Enterprise Mission Portal.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
I have a setup at home where I keep a local git server running on a Raspberry Pi 3 which contains personal/work journal, dotfiles and a personal policy repository. It was set up manually so before adding a new git repository for a family password store I set about retrofiting the configuration in CFEngine. The goal in this blog is to ensure that what I have already is managed by CFEngine and that what I want to add, /srv/git/passwords.git, is created.
