Bundles
A bundle is a collection of promises. They allow to group related promises together into named building blocks that can be thought of as "subroutines" in the CFEngine promise language. A bundle that groups a number of promises related to configuring a web server or a file system would be named "webserver" or "filesystem," respectively.
NOTE: Bundles are not functions. They maintain state across actuations within the same agent run.
- Classic arrays are cleared at the beginning of a bundle actuation.
- Lists, strings, ints, reals, and data-containers are preserved but can be
re-defined if not guarded with
if => isvariable()
. bundle
scoped classes are cleared at the end of the bundles executionnamespace
scoped classes are not cleared automatically, though they can be explicitly undefined.
Most promise types are specific to a particular kind of interpretation that
requires a typed interpreter - the bundle type. Bundles belong to the agent
that is used to keep the promises in the bundle. So cf-agent
has bundles
declared as:
bundle agent my_name
{
}
while cf-serverd
has bundles declared as:
bundle server my_name
{
}
and cf-monitord
has bundles declared as
bundle monitor my_name
{
}
A number of promises can be made in any kind of bundle since they are of a
generic input/output nature. These are vars
, classes
, defaults
,
meta
and reports
promises.
Common Bundles
Bundles of type common
may only contain the promise types that are common to
all bodies. Their main function is to define cross-component global
definitions.
bundle common globals
{
vars:
"global_var" string => "value";
classes:
"global_class" expression => "value";
}
Common bundles are observed by every agent, whereas the agent specific bundle types are ignored by components other than the intended recipient.
Rules for evaluation of common bundles
These are the specific evaluation differences between common and agent bundles:
- common bundles are automatically evaluated even if they are not in the bundlesequence, as long as they have no parameters
- auto-evaluated common bundles (not in the bundlesequence explicitly) don't evaluate their
reports
promises, so their reports won't be printed. - when common bundles define a class, it's global (
scope
isnamespace
) by default; the classes in agent bundles are local (scope
isbundle
) by default. - common bundles can only contain
meta
,default
,vars
,classes
, andreports
promises
Bundle Parameters
Bundles can be parameterized, allowing for code re-use. If you need to do the same thing over and over again with slight variations, using a promise bundle is an easy way to avoid unnecessary duplication in your promises.
bundle agent hello_world
{
vars:
"myfiles" => "/tmp/world.txt";
"desired_content" string => "hello";
"userinfo" data => parsejson('{ "mark": 10, "jeang":20, "jonhenrik":30, "thomas":40, "eben":-1 }');
methods:
"Hello World"
usebundle => ensure_file_has_content("$(myfiles)", "$(desired_content)");
"report" usebundle => subtest_c(@(userinfo));
}
bundle agent ensure_file_has_content(file, content)
{
files:
"$(file)"
handle => "$(this.bundle)_file_content",
create => "true",
edit_defaults => empty,
edit_line => append_if_no_line("$(content)"),
comment => "Ensure that the given parameter for file '$(file)' has only
the contents of the given parameter for content '$(content)'";
}
bundle agent subtest_c(info)
{
reports:
"user ID of mark is $(info[mark])";
}
You can pass slist
and data
variables to other bundles with
the @(var)
notation. You do NOT need to qualify the variable name
with the current bundle name.
Scope
All variables in CFEngine are globally accessible. If you refer to a variable by ‘$(unqualified)’, then it is assumed to belong to the current bundle. To access any other (scalar) variable, you must qualify the name, using the name of the bundle in which it is defined:
$(bundle_name.qualified)
The value of the variable depends on evaluation order, which is not controllable by the user. Thus you should not assume that you can evaluate a bundle twice with different variables and get variables from it that correspond to the second evaluation. In other words, if you have:
bundle agent mybundle(x)
{
vars:
"y" string => $(x);
}
and call mybundle(1)
and mybundle(2)
, the variable y
could be 1
or 2
.
By default classes defined by classes
type promises
inside agent
bundles are not visible outside those bundles, they are bundle
scoped. Classes defined by classes
type promises in
common
bundles have a namespace
scope, so they are visible everywhere.
Note that namespaced bundles work exactly the same way as
non-namespaced bundles (which are actually in the default
namespace). You just say namespace:bundle_name
instead of
bundle_name
. See Namespaces for more details.