[rudder-users] Question about Rudder & CF-Engine

[Jonathan Clarke]

Hi Jonathan,

On 16/12/13 14:02, Jonathan Bayer wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking at rudder to see if it will fit in our company.
>
> My first question, which I couldn't find an answer to in the archives:
>
> Does Rudder require a specific version of CF-Engine?  or can it use a 
> version which we install using our own RPMs?

Different major versions of Rudder (2.4, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8...) require 
different major versions of CFEngine. This is because Rudder provides 
CFEngine promises, and they use features or syntax that are available or 
not compatible with different versions of CFEngine. For the current 
releases, this is simple: 2.6 and 2.7 require CFEngine 3.4.x and 2.8+ 
require CFEngine 3.5.x.

Rudder provides a single package called "rudder-agent" (RPM and deb) 
that includes the version of CFEngine it needs, the FusionInventory 
inventory agent, and some initial promises to get a node running. This 
is primarily to make it easier to install agents everywhere. To make 
installing Rudder easy, this package installs CFEngine in a different 
path (/var/rudder/cfengine-community) than the standard CFEngine. So you 
can easily install both side by side.

So, to put things simply: in theory it would be possible to use your own 
CFEngine installed by your own RPMs, but it is designed to be easy for 
you to add a rudder-agent alongside them, and migrate over.

You may be interested to read this blog post about migrating from 
CFEngine to Rudder, in particular installing the rudder-agent package 
via an already installed CFEngine: 
https://www.mauras.ch/rudder-migrate-from-cfengine.html.

Note: Occasionnaly, we include extra patches in our build of CFEngine 
(in the rudder-agent package), that are from the CFEngine developers but 
not yet released in a stable version. This only affects some special 
cases though, so don't worry about that.

I hope this answers your question. Let us know if and when you have others!

Regards,
Jonathan