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What is the CFEngine Design Center?

The Design Center is a public repository for customizable CFEngine design patterns and code. Here you can download finished solutions to use and adapt them for your environment, or find examples that inspire you to develop new patterns. The CFEngine Design Center is a place for infrastructure engineers to share and re-use knowledge and expertise.

Whether you are just getting started with CFEngine or are a veteran writing CFEngine policies, the Design Center has something for you. The focus of this Design Center is a collection of Sketches. Sketches capture common configuration and policy for a software applications and utilities such as MySQL, Wordpress, and Apache.

• Introduction to CFEngine Sketches - For more information about Policies and Sketches read this overview.

• Introduction to Design Centers Tools: cf-sketch - The main tool you will use to interact with Sketches from the command line is cf-sketch

• Introduction to Design Centers Tools: cf-dc-api - The API protocol is implemented by the cf-dc-api.pl tool.

• Introduction to Design Center API - The Design Center API lets you interact with Design Center over a simple JSON protocol.

Getting Started with Design Center

If you are new to CFEngine, the Design Center is the place to start. By installing and configuring Sketches, CFEngine administrators can get started without touching a single line of CFEngine code.

The sketches available from the DC have been carefully reviewed and tested to guarantee that they will perform their task as indicated. Here are some of the tasks you could complete using CFEngine Sketches:

• Install and configure MySQL on a Linux server, using the Database::Install::MySQL sketch. Or how about PostgreSQL? Try Database::Install::PostgreSQL..

• Configure sshd on a Unix server, using the Security::SSH sketch.

• Configure DNS Settings, the local hosts table, or the system clock timezone using the System::config_resolver, System::etc_hosts or System::tzconfig sketches, respectively.

If you are an advanced CFEngine user, you will find that the Design Center is full of components for managing complex tasks. The use of sketches will allow you to simplify your existing policies, while retaining full control over the parameters used. These shared sketches may even allow you to do a few complex things that you had not implemented yet.

In addition, you have probably accumulated over time a good number of useful CFEngine bundles and body definitions, and techniques for performing useful tasks. We encourage you to contribute to the Design Center, so that more people can benefit from your experience and knowledge.

What's next?

We invite you to:

• Read the Getting started with Design Center guide to learn how to install cf-sketch and its basic usage.
• Visit the CFEngine Design Center repository on github to get an idea of what it contains.
• Read the Writing DC Sketches and Contributing to the CFEngine Design center guides to learn how to write and contribute your own sketches.

If you have any comments, please let us know by sending email to [email protected].