There are some tweaks which were applied to the standard cfengine3 installation and you should be aware of them: *) cfengine3 is FHS, that means that, unlike the original, the binaries are located in /usr/sbin; for upstream compatibility we have the following symlink: /usr/sbin -> /var/lib/cfengine3/bin *) to enable the daemons you need to modify /etc/default/cfengine3 and set the proper variables; the daemons won't be started unless there is an /etc/cfengine3/promises.cf file present. If you do not have your own policy (i.e.: you are not using cfengine as an agent which is fetching files from a policy hub), then you could experiment with the masterfiles library (the former Community Open Promise Body Library), those files are located in: /usr/share/cfengine3/masterfiles/ Additionally, if your /var/lib/cfengine3/masterfiles directory was empty at the time of the installation, you got these files copied over already. *) By default we are not starting any daemon, in most of your installations you will only need the cfagent with a proper configuration file *) For more info you should have a look at the reference manual and the relevant docs: https://docs.cfengine.com/latest/