For the final post in the Feature Friday series I am here to tell you about something I use nearly hourly, ob-cfengine3 which extends Emacs Org Babel for executing CFEngine policy. ob-cfengine3 has been around for a little over seven years now and it has saved me countless hours, seconds at a time. At it’s core it let’s you type a snippet of policy and execute it directly in your document, sort of like Jupyter.

Join Cody and Nick for a Christmas Special showcasing the new Audit Log in Mission Portal for CFEngine 3.25. Nick walked through the new Audit Log demonstrating how actions in Mission Portal are tracked and available for review. He also took a quick look at changes to the global search and taking some questions of air from a few attendees.

Do you enjoy escaping quotes inside strings? I sure don’t, and I really appreciate the flexibility CFEngine provides with 3 different quoting characters (", ', ` ). Let’s take a look. This came up in the post show discussion for The agent is in, episode 39.

CFEngine works by defining a desired state for a given context and converging towards that goal. Given there is no fixed starting point and that the current context might change wildly it can be challenging to succinctly answer the question “What would CFEngine do?”. In Feature Friday: Don’t fix, just warn we saw how an individual promise could be made to warn instead of trying to automatically converge towards the desired state, a granular --dry-run mode.

Implicit list iteration in CFEngine is quite a unique and novel feature. Today we look at a practice example showing how lists can improve the readability and maintainability of your policy. A novel feature in CFEngine is how a list variable is iterated when referenced as a scalar ($(variable)). Let’s take a look at a contrived example.