This year, we are improving CFEngine’s ease of use, so it should come as no surprise that we need to rethink our documentation site. For software like CFEngine, great documentation is not just “nice to have”, but a must for our users, both beginners and experienced. CFEngine has helped DevOps teams to automate their day-to-day tasks and make better decisions by providing a holistic overview of their systems.

Databases are great for data processing and storage. However, in many cases it is better or easier to work with data in files on a file system, some tools even cannot access the data in any other way. When a database (DB) is created in a database management system (DBMS) using a file system as its data storage, it of course uses files on the given file system to store the data.

In this blog post we show how it is possible to run an arbitrary program, script, or execute arbitrary code in reaction to changes and generally events in a PostgreSQL database.

rxdirs has provided a convenient default when setting permissions recursively. When enabled (the default prior to version 3.20.0) a promise to grant read access on a directory is extended to also include execution since quite commonly if you want to read a directory you also want to be able to list the files in the directory. However, the convenience comes with the cost of complicating security reviews since the state requested on the surface is more strict than what is actually granted.