Facter in Puppet

Facter: CLI

The library behind Facter is convenient and easy to expand. This makes Facter the most straightforward way to collect info about a system. If we are given no queries, it will return all facts to us.

Most command line options can be set through the HOCON configuration file. This file can also be used to cache or block specific fact groups.

Options

Examples

For displaying all facts:

$ facter
disks => {
  sda => {
    model => "Virtual disk",
    size => "8.00 GiB",
    size_in_bytes => 85897534592,
    vendor => "ExampleVendor"
  }
}
dmi => {
  bios => {
    release_date => "06/23/2013",
    vendor => "Example Vendor",
    version => "6.00"
  }
}
[...]

For displaying a single structured fact:

$ facter processors
{
  count => 1,
  isa => "x86_64",
  models => [
  "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz"
  ],
  physicalcount => 1
}

Format facts as JSON:

$ facter --json os.name os.release.major processors.isa
{
  "os.name": "Ubuntu",
  "os.release.major": "14.04",
  "processors.isa": "x86_64"
}

Facter: Core Facts

Here is the list of all the built-in facts that ship with Facter, including newer structured facts and legacy facts. 

Modern Facts

Legacy Facts

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Puppet?

It is a tool that helps manage and automate the configuration of servers.

What is Puppet code?

Puppet code is an easy way to programmatically describe what configurations should be in place on the operating systems & applications that you want to manage.

How do you create a custom fact in Puppet?

Custom facts can be added to the main Puppet server by writing snippets of Ruby code. Puppet then distributes the facts to the client via plug-ins in modules.

How do you identify Puppet facts?

Run facter -p on the command line to see a node's fact values or browse facts on node detail pages in the Puppet Enterprise console.

What is puppet software used for?

Puppet is a software configuration management and deployment tool that is open source. It is most commonly used on Linux and Windows to pull the strings on multiple application servers simultaneously.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored the topic of Facter in Puppet. We started with introducing Puppet, and then we further discussed Facter and Facter: CLI.

We hope this blog has helped you enhance your knowledge of Facter in Puppet and if you want to learn more, check out our articles here.

You can refer to other similar articles as well

• Developer Information in Puppet
   
• Configuration Management 
   
• Life Cycle of Puppet run
   
• Management Concept in Puppet Enterprise
   
• Configuring and Adding Integrations in Puppet Enterprise
   

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