CFEngine is very simple to set up and use, especially if all of the clients and the hub are going to be using the same promises. But what if there are certain things you want to enforce on a hub and not a client? What if there are certain things you want to enforce on a client but not on a hub?

The CFEngine policy analyzer is an awesome new service introduced in CFEngine 3.13. The policy analyzer allows you to quickly debug policies and inspect what is going on under hood of CFEngine. A known challenge with CFEngine, and most DSL based automation tools, relates to understanding what is actually going on during live operations. Many users view it as “black-box magic”. Unfortunately, the amount of magic and the size of the black box increases with the level of automation.

CFEngine 3.12.0 introduced the augments key to the Augments file format. If you are not already familiar with Augments, check it out. It’s a very easy way to define classes and variables very early during agent execution, before policy.

CFEngine 3.12.1 LTS has now been released. This release brings many stability and performance improvements to the 3.12 LTS series. It is a stable and well-tested version of CFEngine. We wish to extend a big thanks to the ecosystem that helps make CFEngine great by reporting bugs, contributing fixes and suggesting new and improved functionality. Without you, CFEngine would not be the powerful, high performance, widely used product we all appreciate today!

Today we are very happy to announce the release of CFEngine 3.13.0. This is a non-LTS release, introducing new features and functionality. There is a lot happening with CFEngine these days! This release is closely following last weeks release of CFEngine 3.10.5 LTS, and soon we will also release the next patch version of our 3.12 LTS series. So keep following our updates!

How do you deal with config files that need different settings based on various services that are running on a host and cooperate with other teams? It’s a common question, and it came up on in #cfengine on irc.freenode.net recently. The issue is that team A might be working on package A, which requires some environment variables set. But team B might be working on a totally different thing — and want to achieve the same thing.

Today we are very happy to announce the maintenance release of CFEngine 3.10.5. This is an update to the LTS 3.10 series, adding improved stability, several bug fixes and increased performance. 3.10 LTS is the successor of 3.7 LTS that, since August 2018, is no longer supported. We recommend everyone still using CFEngine 3.7 to upgrade to either 3.10 or 3.12. We are available to support you with such an upgrade if you need it.