CODEWITHSUNDEEP
puppet
souser
souser

Reputation: 6120

Puppet : Is this the correct way to generate external facts?

I am slightly confused about external facts.
In the simplest form, I could create a json file in the facts.d folder and get it to work. But I need it built dynamically, via some shell script which creates the json file. I have created the following and gotten it to work but I cannot tell whether this is the right way to do it:

  1. shell script in the facts.d folder

    cat <<END>some_facts.yaml
---
myfacts_array:
END
for file in `some folder`  
do
  echo "  - $file" >>some_facts.yaml
done

  2. The yaml file in turn looks like this

    ---
myfacts_array:
  - 123456
  - 456789

Is this the right way to achieve this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 573

Answers (1)

John Bollinger
John Bollinger

Reputation: 180201

Puppet relies on Facter for collecting facts, including external ones. Facter has supported structured, executable, external facts only since version 3.5, which is a little less than two years old. If your version of Facter is older, and you cannot upgrade, then you'll need to find a workaround, such as periodically writing a flat YAML or JSON file in the external facts directory.

If you do have a suitable version of Facter, then the script to execute must

  • reside in the external facts directory
  • start with an appropriate shebang line
  • be executable
  • produce well-formed YAML or JSON output representing a hash whose keys are the fact names, and whose values are the associated fact values.*

If the script source you presented is meant to be a complete example then it is at least missing a shebang line, but the output appears to be correctly formed. Beyond that, I haven't any comment about whether what you present is "the right way" to do it.

* YAML or JSON is required to produce structured facts this way. For plain string facts you can instead output KEY = VALUE pairs, one per line.

Upvotes: 1

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