CF-AGENT(8)

📦
version 3.24.1 · 2 versions
, in debian trixie

💖 CF-AGENT(8) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the System Manager's Manual page for cf-agent — she's the queen bee of the CFEngine crew and she's about to run your whole policy life. ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

cf-agent — evaluate CFEngine policy code and actuate change to the system.

no cap, that's the whole job description. 🫶

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

cf-agent [OPTION]...  [FILE]

👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

So cf-agent evaluates policy code and makes changes to the system. That's her whole thing. 💅

Policy bundles get evaluated in the order of the provided bundlesequence — and that bundlesequence is normally specified in the common control body, iykyk. Then, for each bundle, cf-agent groups promise statements according to their type. And then promise types are evaluated in a preset order, because the goal is fast system convergence to policy. iconic behavior honestly.

✨ OPTIONS ✨

  • --bootstrap, -B _value_ — bootstrap CFEngine to the given policy server IP, hostname, or :avahi (that's automatic detection, slay) 🎀
  • --bundlesequence, -b _value_ — set or override the bundlesequence straight from the command line
  • --workdir, -w _value_ — override the default /var/cfengine work directory, for testing purposes (same as setting CFENGINE_TEST_OVERRIDE_WORKDIR)
  • --debug, -d — enable debugging output 🔥
  • --define, -D _value_ — define a list of comma separated classes to be defined at the start of execution
  • --self-diagnostics, -x _value_ — run checks to diagnose a CFEngine agent installation 🩺
  • --dry-run, -n — all talk and no action mode, bestie: make no changes, only inform of promises not kept 🙈
  • --file, -f _value_ — specify an alternative input file than the default. Heads up: this option is overridden by FILE if supplied as an argument.
  • --help, -h — print the help message
  • --inform, -I — print basic information about changes made to the system, i.e. promises repaired
  • --log-level, -g _value_ — specify how detailed logs should be. Possible values: 'error', 'warning', 'notice', 'info', 'verbose', 'debug'
  • --negate, -N _value_ — define a list of comma separated classes to be undefined at the start of execution
  • --no-lock, -K — ignore locking constraints during execution (ifelapsed/expireafter) if "too soon" to run
  • --verbose, -v — output verbose information about the behaviour of the agent
  • --version, -V — output the version of the software
  • --timing-output, -t — output timing information on console when in verbose mode
  • --trust-server, -T _value_ — possible values: 'yes' (default, trust the server when bootstrapping), 'no' (server key must already be trusted)
  • --color, -C _value_ — enable colorized output. Possible values: 'always', 'auto', 'never'. If the option is used, the default value is 'auto' 🌈
  • --no-extensions, -E — disable extension loading (used while upgrading)
  • --timestamp, -l — log timestamps on each line of log output
  • --ignore-preferred-augments, - — ignore def_preferred.json file in favor of def.json
  • --log-modules, - _value_ — enable even more detailed debug logging for specific areas of the implementation. Use together with '-d'. Use --log-modules=help for a list of available modules 🔍
  • --no-augments, - — do not load augments (def.json)
  • --no-host-specific-data, - — do not load host-specific data (host_specific.json)
  • --show-evaluated-classes, - _value_ — show final evaluated classes, including those defined in common bundles in policy. Optionally can take a regular expression.
  • --show-evaluated-vars, - _value_ — show final evaluated variables, including those defined without dependency to user-defined classes in policy. Optionally can take a regular expression.
  • --skip-bootstrap-policy-run, - — do not run policy as the last step of the bootstrap process
  • --skip-bootstrap-service-start, - — do not start CFEngine services as part of the bootstrap process
  • --skip-db-check, - _value_ — do not run database integrity checks and repairs at startup
  • --simulate, - _value_ — run in simulate mode, either 'manifest', 'manifest-full' or 'diff'

🧚 CFENGINE 🧚

CFEngine provides automated configuration management of large-scale computer systems. A system administrator describes the desired state of a system using CFEngine policy code. The program cf-agent reads policy code and attempts to bring the current system state to the desired state described. Policy code is downloaded by cf-agent from a cf-serverd daemon. The daemon cf-execd is responsible for running cf-agent periodically.

Documentation for CFEngine is available at https://docs.cfengine.com/. 📚

💜 PROMISE THEORY 💜

CFEngine is built on principles from promise theory, proposed by Mark Burgess in 2004. Promise theory is a model of voluntary cooperation between individual, autonomous actors or agents who publish their intentions to one another in the form of promises. A promise is a declaration of intent whose purpose is to increase the recipient's certainty about a claim of past, present or future behaviour. For a promise to increase certainty, the recipient needs to trust the promiser, but trust can also be built on the verification that previous promises have been kept, thus trust plays a symbiotic relationship with promises. 🫶

For an introduction to promise theory, please see http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.3294/

⭐ AVAILABILITY ⭐

cf-agent is part of CFEngine.

Binary packages may be downloaded from https://cfengine.com/download/.

The source code is available at https://github.com/cfengine/

💀 BUGS 💀

Please see the public bug-tracker at https://northerntech.atlassian.net/projects/CFE/.

GitHub pull-requests may be submitted to https://github.com/cfengine/core/.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

cf-promises(8), cf-agent(8), cf-serverd(8), cf-execd(8), cf-monitord(8), cf-runagent(8), cf-key(8)

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

Mark Burgess and Northern.tech AS

okay so that's literally the whole page, bestie. go forth and converge. 💖

and that's the vibe check on this one — she's from the System Administration section of the CFEngine manual, CF-AGENT(8), and yes the manual itself is just called CFEngine. mwah. 💅✨

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