Where to put policy you write

CFEngine includes a scheduler, cf-execd, similar to cron. If you've installed and bootstrapped, cf-execd should run the agent every 5 minutes.

The agent (cf-agent), is responsible for making changes to the system, it evaluates policy from /var/cfengine/inputs/. The 2 most important policy files are update.cf and promises.cf:

• update.cf pulls updated policy from /var/cfengine/masterfiles on the policy server to /var/cfengine/inputs locally.
  • On the policy server, behavior is the same - policy is copied from /var/cfengine/masterfiles to /var/cfengine/inputs.
• promises.cf is the entry point of the policy set.

Autorun - Making your policy run automatically every 5 minutes

There are many ways to run your policy, but the easiest is using autorun. You can enable this feature via augments, add a JSON at /var/cfengine/masterfiles/def.json:

{
  "classes": {
    "services_autorun": [ "any" ]
  }
}

Here is a very basic policy, which creates a file:

bundle agent create_hello
{
  meta:
    "tags" slist => { "autorun" }; # Enable autorun
  files:
    "/root/hello.txt"
      create => "true";
}

Place the file in /var/cfengine/masterfiles/services/autorun/. Any files you place in that folder will be added to inputs ("imported"). Any bundles in those files tagged with autorun will be evaluated.

This policy should now be run approximately every 5 minutes, on all hosts you have bootstrapped to this policy server.