CFEngine tip #003: The distinction between bodies and bundles

This is an extract from Chapter 3 of "Learning CFEngine 3", where you can also find a much more comprehensive description of bodies and bundles in the CFEngine 3 policy language.

The distinction between bundles and bodies can be confusing at first. Remembering these points may help:

• Bodies are named groups of attributes, whereas bundles are collections of promises. Promises are the units that actually do something in CFEngine (for example, run a command or add a line to a file), whereas attributes specify characteristics of how things are done (for example, whether to run the command in a shell, or where in the file to add the line).

• The value of an attribute can be a basic data type (string, integer, list, etc.), it can be the name of a body, or it can be the name of a bundle.

• The type of an attribute’s value is fixed, and determined by the attribute itself (for example, the value of the depth_search attribute in a files: promise is always a body, and the value of an edit_line attribute is always a bundle).

• For bodies and bundles, their type is always the name of the attribute to which they correspond. For example, bodies to be used with the depth_search attribute are always declared as “body depth_search xyz”, where xyz is an arbitrary name of your choosing. The same goes for bundles: bundles to be used with the edit_line attribute are always declared as “bundle edit_line xyz".

  There are only four types of “top level” bundles that are not used as arguments to attributes: agent, server, knowledge and monitor.

• The promise types (sections) that can appear in a bundle are determined by the bundle type. For example, commands: promises can only appear in bundles of type agent.