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You started with Ansible, and for a long time it was the only thing you needed. With a handful of playbooks and an inventory file, you got the job done. However, as the fleet grew, runs went from taking minutes to hours, and parts of the inventory were unreachable at any given moment. This is not an Ansible flaw. Push-based configuration and continuous state enforcement are simply two different jobs. This blog post is all about getting you started with a hybrid system.

CFEngine 3.29.0 changes how storage promises treat a filesystem that is already mounted. A promise for an unmounted filesystem now mounts only that filesystem instead of all unmounted filesystems, edit_fstab actively maintains the file system table entry to keep it aligned with the promise even when the filesystem is already mounted, and an unmount promise acts only on the explicitly promised filesystem.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with the ansible promise type by Fabio Tranchitella. It’s amazing how easy it is to leverage the benefits of agents with all the existing automation from the ansible community. Hence, I wanted to share it in a blog post, with an emphasis on easy. Let’s start off by creating a new cfbs project in a cfengine-ansible directory. Make sure to answer yes on the prompt to build on top of the default policy set.

Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CFEngine 3.28.0! The code word for this release is introspection. This is a non-LTS, not supported, feature release, with features which will become part of the next LTS scheduled for summer 2027.

Drive failures are a matter of when, not if. The good news is that most modern drives warn you before they fail, using S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). The challenge is collecting that data across a fleet and making it actionable. The new inventory-smartctl module makes this straightforward with a single cfbs add. Once installed, the module auto-detects all storage devices, caches their SMART data, and exposes it as inventory attributes in Mission Portal.

Three notable dnf related improvements making it easier to manage packages on modern Enterprise Linux based systems (Red Hat, Rocky Linux, Alama Linux, etc …) have been merged recently.

CFEngine 3.24.4+, 3.27.1+, and 3.28.0+ include a change to how findfiles() handles trailing slashes on directory paths. This change restores trailing slashes to directory results, but with improved consistency compared to earlier versions. The new behavior ensures that directory paths always include a trailing slash, making them reliably distinguishable from file paths regardless of the glob pattern used.

Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CFEngine 3.27.0! The code word for this release is exploration. This release also marks an important event, the beginning of the 3.27 LTS series, which will be supported for 3 years. Several new features have been added since the release of CFEngine 3.24 LTS, in the form of non-LTS releases.

Here comes a profoundly belated blog post on a behavior change. Better late than never. Due to various bugs with the glob engine on Windows, we decided to rewrite it in CFEngine 3.24.0. Not only does the new glob engine resolve these bugs on Windows, but it also adds support for brace expansion on all platforms. E.g. findfiles.cf command output.

Today, we are pleased to announce the release of CFEngine 3.26.0! Being a non-LTS (not supported) release, this release allows users to test the new functionality we’ve been working on before it arrives in an LTS release later this year. The codename for this release is a bit different, as it is named after a new feature introduced, and what it eliminates - the admin user.