Facter

Facter is Puppet’s cross-platform system profiling library. It discovers and reports per-node facts, which are available in your Puppet manifests as variables.

Facter is published as a gem to https://rubygems.org/. If you've already got Ruby installed, you can install Facter by running:

gem install facter

• Facter: CLI

• Facter: Core Facts

• Custom facts overview

  You can add custom facts by writing snippets of Ruby code on the primary Puppet server. Puppet then uses plug-ins in modules to distribute the facts to the client.

• Writing custom facts

  A typical fact in Facter is an collection of several elements, and is written either as a simple value (“flat” fact) or as structured data (“structured” fact). This page shows you how to write and format facts correctly.

• External facts

  External facts provide a way to use arbitrary executables or scripts as facts, or set facts statically with structured data. With this information, you can write a custom fact in Perl, C, or a one-line text file.

• Configuring Facter with facter.conf

  The facter.conf file is a configuration file that allows you to cache and block fact groups and facts, and manage how Facter interacts with your system. There are four sections: facts, global, cli, and fact-groups. All sections are optional and can be listed in any order within the file.