Show posts tagged:
tooling

Migrating to cfbs

Traditionally, CFEngine policy sets are managed as a whole. When upgrading the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF)1 users must download the new version of the policy framework and integrate it into the existing policy set, carefully diffing the vendored policy files against their currently integrated policy. Updates to policy authored by others must be sought out and similarly integrated. The burden is on the user to maintain the knowledge of where policy is sourced, if updates are available, and how it is integrated into the policy set as a whole.

Posted by Nick Anderson
June 1, 2023

Show Notes: The Agent is In - Episode 21 - Troubleshooting with cf-support

What’s the best way to collect information when troubleshooting something with CFEngine? Cody and Nick chat with Craig about cf-support a new tool shipping in the latest (and future) versions of CFEngine. 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. Links Connect on LinkedIn w/ Cody, Craig, or Nick All Episodes cf-support is packaged as part of 3.

Posted by Nick Anderson
January 26, 2023

CFEngine Build System version 3

Our beloved cfbs CLI tool for working with CFEngine Build is rapidly evolving. At the time of writing, we are currently at version 3.2.1. Thus I would like to take this opportunity to talk a bit about the latest and greatest features; including support for users to manipulate input parameters in modules, as well as a couple of new build steps. If you haven’t yet got a hold of the latest version of cfbs, you can update it with pip using the following command:

Posted by Lars Erik Wik
November 15, 2022

Accessing CFEngine nightly packages

Did you know that nightly builds of CFEngine are available? cf-remote is the most convenient way to get nightly packages. If you’re not familiar with it, or if you need a refresher, check out our other blog posts about cf-remote. Listing packages By default cf-remote list will emit a list of available releases and the URLs for the newest CFEngine Enterprise LTS release. cf-remote list Available releases: master, 3.20.0, 3.18.x, 3.

Posted by Nick Anderson
October 12, 2022

Guest blog post: Quick-start guide to using Emacs for CFEngine

This guide is designed for the novice user of CFEngine who wishes to explore the power of Emacs while developing CFEngine policy files – and will introduce the use of some Emacs features and plugins along the way. There are two types of editors available in the Unix and Linux world: line and visual. Examples of line editors are ed and sed. These allow you to edit a file one line at a time.

Posted by Jeff Carlson
August 26, 2022

CFEngine Build System version 2

A while back we released version 2 of cfbs, and even though we release versions of this tool quite frequently, without announcing it on the blog, we thought this was a good opportunity to talk a bit about the tool, what’s new and our direction with it in the future. The reason why we called this the “2.0” release is that we are trying to follow semantic versioning, and there were some big new features in the release which could be considered breaking changes.

June 14, 2022

The Agent is In - Episode 12 - Spacemacs for CFEngine

Looking to be more efficient writing CFEngine policy? Nick Anderson (Doer of Things) walks us through setting up Spacemacs for CFEngine. Get syntax highlighting, on the fly error checking, function prototypes, integration with the venerable org-mode and more! 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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
April 28, 2022

CFEngine bootstrap with Ansible

CFEngine and Ansible are two complementary infrastructure management tools. Findings from our analysis show that they can be combined and used side by side with joint forces to handle all areas in the best possible way. Part of infrastructure management is hosts deployment, either when building a brand new infrastructure or when growing one by adding new hosts. This is something Ansible truly excels in as it makes it very easy to run a sequence of steps on all hosts to initialize (deploy) them and it only requires SSH access to the hosts and Python installed on them.

February 3, 2022

Using cfbs with a traditionally managed policy set

With the recent release of build.cfengine.com and cfbs I have been thinking about the process of converting a traditionally manged policy set. I consider a traditionally manged policy set one where you have a repo with the root of masterfiles being the root of the repository, or even having no repository at all and managing masterfiles by editing directly in the distribution point (e.g. /var/cfengine/masterfiles). Before jumping in with both feet and converting to a cfbs managed policy set you might want a hybrid situation where you can leverage some of the benefits of cfbs but without making drastic changes to the way policy is currently managed.

Posted by Nick Anderson
January 31, 2022

Show Notes: The Agent is In - Episode 9 - cf-secret

How can I work with secrets using CFEngine? Craig (Digger) demoed cf-secret and how he uses it for protecting secrets used to mount LUKS encrypted drives. 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. Links cf-secret LUKS Connect on LinkedIn w/ Cody, Craig, or Nick All Episodes

Posted by Nick Anderson
January 27, 2022
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