Puppet – External Facts

External facts is a great way to attach (arbitrary) metadata to a machine during the the launch of a new machine. E.g. when building a Centos 7 aws ec2 instance, you can generate the external facts via userdata.

Puppet can use these external facts in the way as any other fact. You can create external facts by simply creating a file. This file can be a:

• shell script
• yaml file

This file needs to be created inside any of the following 2 folders on a CentOS machine:

• /opt/puppetlabs/facter/facts.d/
• /etc/facter/facts.d

Note: you might need to create the above folders if they don’t already exist.

For example, let’s say I want to create 3 external facts, the ‘key-name=key-values’ are:

role='blog-site'
pipeline_color='Blue'
standby_mode=true

First off, let’s confirm that these facts don’t already exist:

[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p role

[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p pipeline_color

[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p standby_mode

First you need to write this information in a shell-script format like this:

$ cat /etc/facter/facts.d/my_external_facts.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "role=blog-site"
echo "pipeline_color=Blue"
echo "standby_mode=true"

Then make the script executable:

[root@puppetagent1 ~]# chmod ugo+x /etc/facter/facts.d/my_external_facts.sh

After that you should find the new external facts are now working:

[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p role
blog-site
[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p pipeline_color
Blue
[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p standby_mode
true

Note, instead of creating a shell script, we could have created the following yaml file:

[root@puppetagent1 ~]# cat /etc/facter/facts.d/my_external_facts.yaml
---
role: blog-site
pipeline_color: Blue
standby_mode: true

This has the exact same end result:

[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p role
blog-site
[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p pipeline_color
Blue
[root@puppetagent1 ~]# facter -p standby_mode
true

In this guide I have covered a few simple examples. The truth is that the external facts file isn’t just limited to either a shell script or yaml file. You can write it in lots of other forms, e.g. python script, json file,…etc. For more info, see the official external facts documentation.

If you are creating your external facts file via ec2 userdata, then here’s a handy example snippet to place inside your userdata script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

role='blog-site'
pipeline_color='Blue'
standby_mode='true'
 
cat >/opt/puppetlabs/facter/facts.d/my_external_facts.sh << EOF
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "role=${role}"
echo "pipeline_color=${pipeline_color}"
echo "standby_mode=${standby_mode}"
EOF

chmod 0755 /opt/puppetlabs/facter/facts.d/my_external_facts.sh