CFEngine starter pack

CFEngine enterprise can be pretty hard/tedious to build, because of many repos and dependencies. This is an attempt to make it easier for new developers. It is by no means finished, please add GitHub Issues and Pull Requests :)

Installing vagrant and virtualbox

It is recommended, but not required, to run builds and tests inside VMs managed by vagrant.

Install virtualbox: https://www.virtualbox.org/

Install vagrant: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/installation/

Install guest additions plugin:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

It is also possible to use libvirt (KVM) instead of VirtualBox. Apart from the working qemu-kvm setup and libvirt, the vagrant-libvirt plugin has to be installed too. It may either be provided as a package in your distribution or it can be installed by vagrant itself:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt

Please see the libvirt notes section for some more details and suggestions.

Recommended setup

Folder structure

Have all your Northern.tech projects in /northern.tech. Or export NTECH_ROOT with the path to your base folder.

For example:

export NTECH_ROOT="$HOME/northern.tech"

CFEngine projects in $NTECH_ROOT/cfengine (similar for zener, and so on.) The reason to place it at root is so it can have the same absolute path on all VMs, using a mounted shared folder. It is not a strict requirement, it's just easier. If you use another path, you will have to update Vagrantfile and bash scripts.

Something like this does the job:

$ sudo mkdir -p /northern.tech/cfengine
$ export NTECH_ROOT=/northern.tech
$ cd $NTECH_ROOT/cfengine
$ git clone git@github.com:cfengine/starter_pack.git
# if your local username doesn't match your github username then provide it to clone.sh
$ bash ./starter_pack/repos/clone.sh my_github_username
# if they match, just use:
$ bash ./starter_pack/repos/clone.sh
$ cd starter_pack

Note: The clone.sh script clones all CFEngine repos into the current directory

SSH keys

bash scripts/keygen.sh

Will generate ./keys/insecure[.pub]. This will be installed to ~/.ssh/id_rsa[.pub] on all vagrant machines. ./keys/insecure.pub is added to build user's authorized_keys so build-remote can work.

The Vagrantfile also has code to copy your SSH key from your home directory, to authorized_keys in the VMs, so you can use regular ssh commands (instead of vagrant ssh).

Custom init script

If you'd like to make custom changes to the VMs, such as fixing your PATH variable, or installing your own dotfiles, you can put code in the file ./scripts/custom_vm_init.sh. This file is ignored by git, so won't be committed, it will be custom to you. As an example, here is what I (Ole) have in my ./scripts/custom_vm_init.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
curl -L -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/olehermanse/dotfiles/master/install.sh | bash

Getting started with the dev machine

The development machine has all development libraries already installed. It is ready to run autogen, make etc. It will NOT work with build-remote. (See the sections on the buildslave machine below.)

Creating a base box for development

The vagrant VMs use a custom base box where some dependencies are installed. To create this box locally, run:

$ bash ./basebox/create.sh

(vagrant required). This will run commands from basebox/bootstrap.sh on an Ubuntu VM. If you're not using vagrant, you can run/adapt that script on a build/development machine of your choice.

Starting the development machine

$ vagrant up dev

If you ever need a clean dev machine, log out and:

$ vagrant destroy dev
$ vagrant up dev

This is great, because you don't have to be careful not to mess up your dev machine. You can always get a new one within a minute.

Compiling CFEngine Community in the development machine

$ vagrant ssh dev
$ cd /northern.tech/cfengine/core
$ ./autogen.sh --enable-debug
$ make -j2
$ cd ../masterfiles
$ ./autogen.sh --enable-debug

Installing CFEngine Community on a test machine

Hub

$ vagrant up hub
$ vagrant ssh hub
$ cd /northern.tech/cfengine/core
$ ./configure && make && sudo make -j2 install
$ cd ../masterfiles
$ ./configure && make && sudo make -j2 install
$ sudo su -
# /var/cfengine/bin/cf-key
# /var/cfengine/bin/cf-agent --bootstrap 192.168.56.90

Client

$ vagrant up client
$ vagrant ssh client
$ cd /northern.tech/cfengine/core
$ ./configure && make && sudo make -j2 install
$ sudo su -
# /var/cfengine/bin/cf-key
# /var/cfengine/bin/cf-agent --bootstrap 192.168.56.90

build-remote on buildslave

The buildslave machine is set up specifically for the build-remote script. This script checks that certain dependencies are installed, while others are not installed, to avoid conflicting dependencies. Running build-remote from dev VM to buildslave VM is the easiest.

Example: mingw cross compile for windows using build-remote

If you haven't already, create the buildslave base box:

$ bash ./buildslave/create.sh

This VM has some extra dependencies for performing buildslave tasks. You can now use build-remote from dev machine to build on buildslave:

$ vagrant up buildslave
Bringing machine 'buildslave' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
$ vagrant up dev
Bringing machine 'dev' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
$ vagrant ssh dev
vagrant@dev ~ $ ssh build@buildslave
The authenticity of host 'buildslave (192.168.56.100)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:VoU/qb7Y7Pt1HYBw7ze1DXHF3E99hQvhBjoUjme9+3c.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'buildslave,192.168.56.100' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
build@buildslave:~$ logout
Connection to buildslave closed.
vagrant@dev ~ $ bash /northern.tech/cfengine/buildscripts/build-remote -c x64-mingw --source /northern.tech/cfengine --verbose build@buildslave
[...]

This currently works for building dependencies as well as our binaries, but not packaging. The wix.exe dependency is not installed on buildslave, and adding it is not trivial.

If you need packages to test your code, a workaround is to get jenkins to build a package. You can then install the package once, and as you make changes, upload the locally compiled .exe files via scp or similar.

Building CFEngine Enterprise locally

Compiling core, enterprise and nova on the dev machine

Using cf-builder.py:

$ vagrant up dev
$ vagrant ssh dev
$ cd /northern.tech/cfengine/starter_pack
$ python3 cf-builder.py --autogen --make --core --masterfiles --enterprise --nova

The individual steps:

$ python3 cf-builder.py --build-all --dry-run

These commands would run if you didn't specify --dry-run:
cd /northern.tech/cfengine && cd core && ./autogen.sh --enable-debug
cd /northern.tech/cfengine && cd core && make -j2
cd /northern.tech/cfengine && cd enterprise && ./autogen.sh --enable-debug
cd /northern.tech/cfengine && cd enterprise && make -j2
cd /northern.tech/cfengine && cd nova && ./autogen.sh --enable-debug --with-postgresql-hub=/usr
cd /northern.tech/cfengine && cd nova && make -j2

(You can run the steps without using cf-builder.py, simplify the cd commands if you'd like)

WIP! Installing CFEngine on hub machine

In general, don't install on your dev machine, and don't run sudo commands on the dev machine. Everything you're doing there should work without sudo. Use the hub and client machines to install and bootstrap.

After compiling on dev machine, use cf-builder.py to install on hub:

$ vagrant up hub
$ vagrant ssh hub
$ sudo su
$ cd /northern.tech/cfengine/starter_pack
$ python3 cf-builder.py --install --all-repos
$ /var/cfengine/bin/cf-key
$ bash scripts/initdb.sh
$ /var/cfengine/bin/cf-agent --bootstrap 192.168.56.90

WIP! Running no-install reporting test

docs.cfengine.com

The documentation is built with Jekyll and some custom tooling. Some very specific tool versions are supported.

Bring up build host

vagrant up docbuildslave

During provisioning it runs _scripts/provisioning-install-build-tool-chain.sh

To perform a build log into docbuildslave and run starter_pack/build-docs.sh from the documentation-generator repository.

vagrant ssh docbuildslave
vagrant@docbuildslave ~ $ bash /northern.tech/cfengine/documentation-generator/_scripts/starter_pack-build-docs.sh

Browse the site in $NTECH_ROOT/cfengine/documentation-generator/_site/index.html

How Nick last build successfully

These are some raw notes about how I last used this successfully. I iterated until I got a successful run of jekyll, site preview didn't quite work, but it helped me iterate on fixing up links which can be difficult if the auto linking doesn't work.

rm -rf /northern.tech/cfengine/documentation
rsync -avz ~/CFEngine/documentation /northern.tech/cfengine/
rm -rf /northern.tech/cfengine/documentation-generator
rsync -avz ~/CFEngine/documentation-generator /northern.tech/cfengine/

cd /northern.tech/cfengine/core
git checkout master
git pull --rebase upstream  master

cd /northern.tech/cfengine/mission-portal
git checkout master
git pull --rebase upstream  master

cd /northern.tech/cfengine/nova
git checkout master
git pull --rebase upstream  master

cd /northern.tech/cfengine/masterfiles
git checkout master
git pull --rebase upstream  master

cd /northern.tech/cfengine/enterprise
git checkout master
git pull --rebase upstream  master

cd /northern.tech/cfengine/nova
git checkout master
git pull --rebase upstream  master


cd ~/CFEngine/starter_pack
vagrant rsync docbuildslave
vagrant ssh docbuildslave -c "bash /northern.tech/cfengine/documentation-generator/_scripts/starter_pack-build-docs.sh"

vagrant ssh-config docbuildslave > /tmp/docbuildslave.ssh-config
scp -rF /tmp/docbuildslave.ssh-config docbuildslave:/northern.tech/cfengine/documentation-generator/_site ./

Installing a pre-built hub package

The hub VM comes with dependencies already installed to make it easy to build and install CFEngine Enterprise hub locally. If you would rather install a pre-built hub package, remove PostgreSQL:

apt purge postgresql*
wget http://buildcache.cfengine.com/packages/testing-pr/jenkins-pr-pipeline-9281/PACKAGES_HUB_x86_64_linux_ubuntu_20/cfengine-nova-hub_3.22.0a.8c38b8b08~25630.ubuntu20_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i cfengine-nova-hub_*.deb
sudo /var/cfengine/bin/cf-agent -B 192.168.56.90

(This is just an example using the URL from a PR build, replace the 2nd line with the hub package you want to test, or use cf-remote, etc.)

You should be able to open MP in your browser with the IP afterwards:

https://192.168.56.90/

Notes and TODOs

The .git subdirectories get deleted during _run_jekyll.sh but I don't know why. Perhaps something to do with jenkins. So you will want to keep a separate repo and sync your changes to it.

rsync -avz $NTECH_ROOT/cfengine/documentation $HOME/CFEngine/documentation/

libvirt notes

Building baseboxes

There is a step in the create.sh scripts for building baseboxes where they try to package the box (e.g. vagrant package basebox --output base.box). This may fail due to the VM image file not being readable for the current user. However, vagrant even prints out the command to fix it (change the permissions) so just run the suggested command. Unfortunately, the create.sh script stops on this so the particular step has to be run again and then all the follow-up steps have to be run. It would be nice if the permissions could be fixed in advance, but there seems to be no easy way to get the image path for a given vagrant machine.

Synced folders

vagrant-libvirt doesn't support the mechanisms for sharing folders between VMs and the host system. So it either uses rsync to sync the folders (that's why we have some extra rsync options in the Vagrantfile) or sets up NFS to share the folders. However, it quite often fails to set NFS up properly, so it may be necesary to enforce rsync syncing. This can be done by adding type: "rsync" to the synced_folder lines. So something like this:

-    config.vm.synced_folder  ".", "/vagrant",
+    config.vm.synced_folder  ".", "/vagrant", type: "rsync",

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