Facter 4.0.46

Released November 2020 and shipped with Puppet7.0.0.

New features

  • Operating system hierarchy. Facter 4 introduces a hierarchy for operating systems. The hierarchy allows you to load facts from the child and all parents. If the same fact is present in a child and a parent, the one from the child takes precedence. FACT-2555
  • Rake task for mapping fact name and fact class. To improve the visibility of which facts are loaded for an operating system, Facter 4 has a rake task that prints all facts and the class that resolved that fact. FACT-2557
  • Blocklist. Facter 4 allows you to block facts at a granular level — you can block any fact from the fact hierarchy, for both groups of facts and individual facts. FACT-1976
  • Block legacy facts. Legacy facts are a subtype of core facts and you can now block them, like any core fact, using the blocklist from facter.conf. FACT-2259
  • Block custom facts. Facter 4 allows you to block custom facts. You can add the fact to the blocklist from facter.conf. FACT-2718
  • Block external facts.Facter 4 allows you to block external facts. Blocking external facts is different from blocking core and custom facts — you need to specify the name of the file from which external facts are loaded to blocklist in facter.conf. FACT-2717
  • The puppet facts show command. The facter -p and facter --puppet commands have been replaced with puppet facts show. FACT-2719
  • Group for legacy facts. The legacy group contains all the legacy facts. You can find it in lib/facter/config.rb and can block it in facter.conf. FACT-2296
  • The fact-groups group. You can define your own custom groups in facter.conf using the new fact-groups group. The blocklist and ttls groups from facter.conf accept predefined groups, custom groups or fact names. You must use the file name when using external facts. FACT-2331
  • Define fact groups for blocking or caching. You can define new fact groups in facter.conf, and use the group to block or cache facts. FACT-2515
  • External fact caching. To cache external facts, use the filename of the external fact when setting the ttls in facter.conf. FACT-2619

Enhancements

  • CLI compatible with Facter 3. Facter 4 reimplemented the Facter 3 command line interface using thor gem. FACT-1955
  • Loaded facts based on operating system hierarchy. To improve performance, Facter 4 only loads the files and facts that are needed for the operating system it is running on. FACT-2093
  • Log class name in log messages. Improved logging in Facter 4 prints the class from which the log was generated. FACT-2036
  • Restored --timing option to native facter. The restored --timing and -t arguments allow you to see how much time it took each fact to resolve. FACT-1380
  • (Experimental). Reverted parallel resolution of facts. To improve performance, facts are resolved in parallel on JRuby. FACT-2819
  • Timeout on resolution. You can now specify the timeout attribute in custom fact options. FACT-2643
  • Cachingcore facts . To cache core facts, add the fact group to facter.confttls. Fact values are stored and retrieved on future runs. After the ttls expires, the fact is refreshed. FACT-2486

Resolved issues

  • Fix Ruby 2.7 warning on Facter 4.Facter 4 now supports Ruby 2.7. FACT-2649
  • Facter does not support timeout for shell calls. External commands have a timeout, and if they do not complete in the given time, they are forced stop. The default timeout is 300 seconds. You can now specify a timeout using the limit attribute in Facter::Core::Execution.execute. FACT-2793
  • Fact names are treated as regex and can lead to caching of unwanted facts. The regex used to detect facts has been improved to distinguish between fact groups and legacy facts. FACT-2787
  • Facter uptime shows host uptime inside docker container. Previously, the kernel only reported the host uptime inside a Docker container. You can now see the container uptime. FACT-2737
  • A fact present in two groups does not get cached if the second groups has a ttls. If a fact is present in two groups, and both of them have a ttls defined in facter.conf, the lowest ttls is takes precedence. FACT-2786