Inventory management in 3.6, part 1 - Showing variables and classes CFEngine 3.6 introduces a set of features for inventory management, and we’ll have a closer look at one of them today. This feature is part of both the Community and Enterprise editions. It essentially outputs the inventory in terms of classes and variables at a local node. Have a quick look at cf-promises -h of 3.6:
cf-promises -h Usage: cf-promises [OPTION]… [FILE] Options: –eval-functions, - value - Evaluate functions during syntax checking (may catch more run-time errors). Possible values: ‘yes’, ’no’. Default is ‘yes’ –show-classes, - - Show discovered classes, including those defined in common bundles in policy –show-vars , - - Show discovered variables, including those defined anywhere in policy –help , -h - Print the help message … You might see the two new options –show-classes and –show-vars. Let’s test them out.
Over the next few months we’ll be blogging about some of the great features, enhancements and bug fixes coming in CFEngine 3.6. All too often new software is released without anyone taking the time to tell you what’s been done and why it matters.
To start the series we have a blog post by Nick Anderson on the new Host Info Report in the community edition.
Check back each week to learn more about CFEngine 3.6.
We’re proud to release the first Beta package of CFEngine 3.6 to the Community for testing. The new version of CFEngine introduces a huge number of new features to the CFEngine language and a lot of improvements behind the scene. Some highlights from the ChangeLog file: - New promise type “users” for managing local user accounts. - TLS authentication and fully encrypted network protocol - New attributes in ‘bundle server access_rules’ - New variable type ‘data’ for handling of structured data - Tagging of classes and variables with meta data - Many new built-in variables - Many new functions You can download the beta packages for Debian and RedHat based Linux distributions from https://cfengine.com/inside/myspace. The documentation for CFEngine 3.6 lives at https://cfengine.com/docs/master/index.html and is work in progress. We’d like to invite everybody to help us improve CFEngine 3.6 by giving this first beta a trial run. However, this version of CFEngine is not yet ready for production environments, so do not upgrade your existing installation to these packages. Due to the network protocol and authentication changes, compatibility between 3.6 and previous CFEngine versions is limited at this point, and will be improved over the coming weeks as we get closer to the release. To report bugs, use our bug tracker at https://cfengine.com/dev. Contributions in form of pull requests can be made on GitHub at http://github.com/cfengine/core. A big shout-out to all the contributors in the community that have supported our work with feedback, bug reports, input to design discussions and code contributions!
CFEngine 3.5.3 is now available for download. This is a maintenance release of CFEngine 3.5, and introduces a number of fixes and improvements to both Community and Enterprise editions.
Changes in the CFEngine Core: Improved security checks of symlink ownership. A symlink created by a user pointing to resources owned by a different user will no longer be followed.
Changed the way package versions are compared in package promises. (Redmine #3314) In previous versions the comparison was inconsistent. This has been fixed, but may also lead to behavior changes in certain cases. In CFEngine 3.5.3, the comparison works as follows: <package-being-considered> <package_select> <package_version> For instance: apache-2.2.31 “>=” “2.2.0” will result in the package being installed. Bug fixes:
sigurd.teigen@cfengine.com R&D, CFEngine CFEngine has previously had multiple ways of loading data from an external file into a policy. This has been useful for basing policy on tablular data. For example, importing a CSV file to create accounts. Once data has been imported, it may be used using the existing CFEngine scalar and list data types. In order to make this more flexible, we are introducing a new data type ‘data’ for version 3.6 of CFEngine. A data container variable is an arbitrarly nested data structure of CFEngine primitives. You may think of a data container as a JSON document, because initially we are only supporting importing from JSON. However, this may change in the future allowing for importing data from YAML, XML and other files. Let us examine the flexibility and ease of use of this data type by way of an example. bundle agent test { vars: “doc” data => parsejson(’{ “a”: [ 1, 2 ], “b”: true }’); reports: “Hello $(doc[a]) $(doc[b])”; } This will output the following. $ cf-agent/cf-agent test.cf 2013-11-25T15:18:32-0500 notice: /main: R: Hello 1 true 2013-11-25T15:18:32-0500 notice: /main: R: Hello 2 true In this example, we use the function parsejson to assign a new data container. A data container may either be iterated as a list or as a scalar, depending on how it’s indexed. Above, we see that we index into a list ‘a’ in ‘doc’. Meanwhile, ‘b’ in ‘doc’ refers to a scalar. A list may contain other container types (list or maps), but only sibling scalars will be iterated over. Indexing works as in JavaScript, for example $(doc[a][1]) would refer to the second element in the list ‘a’ in ‘doc’. Currently, there is no inline syntax for data containers, although this is being planned for. A function readjson is available to import file, while function mergedata may be used to join existing data container variables into a new variable. We hope that data containers will be a practical way of working with structured data in policy, replacing current uses of arrays. Data containers are also used with the new Mustache template feature also in version 3.6. Learn more about CFEngine by visiting our website Evaluate CFEngine for free (upto 25 licenses, unlimited usage)
CFEngine 3.5.2 is now available for download. This is a maintenance release of CFEngine 3.5, and introduces a number of fixes and improvements to both Community and Enterprise editions. New functionality has been included to the SQL builder and the Design Center integration in Mission Portal.
Changes in CFEngine Enterprise:
MongoDB has been upgraded to version 2.2.4 monitoring data has moved into a separate database - see db-move-monitoring-to-cfmonitor.js script to migrate data Improvements to the Mission Portal:
CFEngine 3.5.1 is now available for download. This is the first maintenance release of CFEngine 3.5, and introduces a number of fixes and improvements to both Community and Enterprise editions. New functionality has been included to the SQL builder and the Design Center integration in Mission Portal.
Community repositories will be updated shortly.
Core Changes:
the CFEngine Standard Library in masterfiles/libraries is now split into promise-type specific policy files, and lives in a version-specific directory. This should have no impact on current code, but allows more granular include of needed stdlib elements (Redmine #3044) file changes are logged with log level Notice, not Error Bug fixes:
CFEngine 3.5.0 Community Edition is now available for download!
At the same time we have updated the CFEngine documentation, which now lives in a new design and information architecture at http://docs.cfengine.com.
This latest release of CFEngine Community comes with a ton of improvements and new language features for policy writers. Many of these changes have been motivated by the great feedback and reports from our users, and a lot of changes were contributed by members of the growing CFEngine community. A big “Thank You!” to you all! Our package repositories will be updated shortly, and we will continue from here with monthly maintenance releases of CFEngine 3.5.x.
The Release Candidate of CFEngine 3.5.0 Community Edition is now available for download at:
https://cfengine.com/inside/myspace
We’re looking forward to your feedback to the changes and improvements!
Significantly improved parsing and evaluation of policies A large number of parser and evaluation problems have been fixed. Iterating over arrays with nested lists has caused many headaches and workarounds in previous versions of CFEngine. With 3.5, many of those can disappear.
Policy developers get clear and consistent messages from the stricter parser. Note: If your policy has syntactically incorrect code, then the new parser will mark those as errors. Fixing those errors should be straight forward, but we’re interested in hearing about your experience with this so that we can make this as smooth as possible and document the typical issues for the final release!
The March snapshot release of CFEngine Community and Enterprise has just hit our webservers. The releases are called 3.5 Beta1 and 3.1 Beta1, respectively, and just as last month: this is work in progress.
Community Some low level changes have been introduced. It is now possible to have empty lists in policies, there is no need to use “cf_null” anymore.
We have continued our architectural work and we have changed FatalError for other less problematics error conditions along the code. This allows us to have a better error handling than what we used to have.
