When working with CFEngine, it’s common to hear advice about separating data from policy. Separating data from policy allows for separation of concerns, delegation of responsibilities and integration with other tooling. Each organization is different, and a strategy that works well in one environment may not work as well in a similar environment of another organization, so CFEngine looks to provide various generic ways to leverage external data.

CFEngine is well suited for use in IoT environments due to it’s portability, size, and performance. There already exists a meta layer for including the CFEngine community client and Masterfiles Policy Framework in Yocto Project builds.

CFEngine and Ansible are two

Manually managing groups on a large infrastructure can be a tedious task, and is therefore best suited through automation software like CFEngine. Unfortunately - at time of writing - CFEngine does not have any built-in promise types for managing groups. But fear not; in CFEngine 3.17, custom promise types were introduced.

Using modules, you can add custom promise types to CFEngine, to manage new resources. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce some of the first official modules, namely git and systemd promise types. They were both written by Fabio Tranchitella, who normally works on our other product, Mender.io. He decided to learn some CFEngine and within a couple of weeks he’s contributed 3 modules, showing just how easy it is to implement new promise types. Thanks, Fabio!

I recently had a minor task involving changing an option - on one of our command line tools - from taking a required argument, to taking an optional argument. This should be easy they said; just change the respective option struct to take an optional argument, add a colon to the optstring, and get on with your life. Well, it proved to be easier said than done. My initial expectation was that a solution similar to the one below should just work. And it does work, just not in the way I expected.

Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CFEngine 3.18.0! The focus of this new version has been extensibility. It also marks an important event, the beginning of the 3.18 LTS series, which will be supported for 3 years. Several new features have been added since the release of CFEngine 3.15 LTS, in the form of non-LTS releases. In this blog post we’ll primarily focus on what is new in 3.18, but we will also highlight some things released in 3.16 and 3.17.

In the past 2 and half months, we have refreshed the visual design of the CFEngine Mission Portal. You might already notice some differences in the navigation, iconography, and color set. This is a post to guide you through the major changes we made and also provide you an inside perspective into the design direction we are taking going forward.

As we’ve hinted at before, 2021 will be a big year for CFEngine. In the summer, we will release CFEngine 3.18 LTS. This is the first LTS release with Compliance Reports , Custom Promise types , and all of the other improvements we’ve made over the past year .

If you are debugging issues with a host, it is quite common to want to make changes to CFEngine policy, and speed up the process of fetching, evaluating and reporting for that host. You can do this by running cf-runagent and cf-hub from the command line, now we’ve brought this functionality into Mission Portal.