Getting started with DC

This page assumes that you have successfully installed cf-sketch and that you are familiar with some of the core concepts of a CFEngine Sketch. If you haven't installed cf-sketch yet, or if you are looking for overview information, you should read the following pages:

• Installing Design Center
• Overview of CFEngine Sketches

First Steps with cf-sketch

Once you've installed cf-sketch, follow this simple walkthrough to run a few commands. The following introduction will get you started, and give you the quick introduction necessary to start making use of the Sketches in the CFEngine Design Center.

Note: you can run all these commands as a regular user. In this case, all the files will be installed under $HOME/.cfagent/ and cf-sketch will use $HOME/.cf-sketch/ as its configuration directory.

When you run cf-sketch, you will be presented with an interactive command prompt from which you can type commands:

# cf-sketch
Welcome to cf-sketch version 2.0.1.
CFEngine AS, 2012.

Enter any command to cf-sketch, use 'help' for help, or 'quit' or '^D' to quit.

cf-sketch> 

Available commands in cf-sketch

TODO

Expert mode

cf-sketch supports an unattended "expert" mode.

Examples of its usage are in the testing Makefile. Use them like this (in this case, we will test the limits sketch):

# cd tools/test
# make limits

Watch an enjoy the fireworks. If you have the pygmentize utility and the JavaScript::Beautifier CPAN module, the output will even be colored and indented nicely.

You can pass the A=x parameter to make to tell it to activate the sketch only when context x is defined.

You can pass the T=x parameter to make to tell it to set the test mode for the sketch only when context x is defined.

The cf-sketch expert mode is intended for testing, not for daily use. You should either use the DC API directly, cf-sketch interactively, or (in CFEngine Enterprise 3.5 and greater) the Design Center GUI.