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 targets 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 target which in turn wrap the retrieved facts
• facts::info - retrieves the facts and returns information about each target's OS compiled from the os fact value retrieved from that target

The provided tasks:

• facts - retrieves the facts and without further processing returns a result set wrapping result objects for each specified target 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 --targets target1.example.com,target2.example.com

Parameters

All plans have only one parameter:

• targets - The targets 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.