nicklewis / puppetlabs-facts

This module provides the facts task. This task allows you to discover facts about remote machines in your infrastructure.

facts

Table of Contents

1. Description
2. Requirements
3. Usage
4. Reference - An under-the-hood peek at what the module is doing and how

Description

This module provides a collection of facts tasks and plans all of which retrieve facts from the specified nodes but each of them processes the retrieved facts differently. The provided plans are:

• facts - retrieves the facts and then stores them in the inventory, returns a result set wrapping result objects for each specified node which in turn wrap the retrieved facts
• facts::info - retrieves the facts and returns information about each node's OS compiled from the os fact value retrieved from that node

The provided tasks:

• facts - retrieves the facts and without further processing returns a result set wrapping result objects for each specified node which in turn wrap the retrieved facts (this task is used by the above plans). This task relies on cross-platform task support; if unavailable, the individual implementations can be used instead.
• facts::bash - bash implementation of fact gathering, used by the facts task.
• facts::powershell - powershell implementation of fact gathering, used by the facts task.
• facts::ruby - ruby implementation of fact gathering, used by the facts task.

puppet_agent module support: The puppet_agent::install_shell task uses the bash.sh implementation code to gather facts. When bash.sh is invoked with the positional argument platform or release only the requested fact is returned.

Example

root@y77tzpv6qxnx5at:~# ./bash.sh 
{
  "os": {
    "name": "Ubuntu",
    "release": {
      "full": "16.04",
      "major": "16",
      "minor": "04"
    },
    "family": "Debian"
  }
}
root@y77tzpv6qxnx5at:~# ./bash.sh "release"
16.04
root@y77tzpv6qxnx5at:~# ./bash.sh "platform"
Ubuntu

Requirements

This module is compatible with the version of Puppet Bolt it ships with.

Usage

To run the facts plan run

bolt plan run facts --nodes node1.example.com,node2.example.com

Parameters

All plans have only one parameter:

• nodes - The nodes to retrieve the facts from.

Reference

The core functionality is implemented in the facts task, which provides implementations for the shell, powershell, and puppet-agent features. The powerhsell and bash implementations of the task compile and return information mimicking that provided by facter's os fact. When the puppet-agent feature is available the ruby implementation will return the result running facter --json on the target.