Adding external facts

The Creating custom facts recipe describes how to add extra facts written in Ruby. You can also create facts from simple text files or scripts with external facts instead.

External facts live in the /etc/facter/facts.d directory and have a simple key=value format like this:

message="Hello, world"

Getting ready

Here's what you need to do to prepare your system to add external facts:

1. You'll need Facter Version 1.7 or higher to use external facts, so look up the value of facterversion or use facter -v:

   [root@cookbook ~]# facter facterversion
   2.3.0
   [root@cookbook ~]# facter -v
   2.3.0
   

2. You'll also need to create the external facts directory, using the following command:

   [root@cookbook ~]# mkdir -p /etc/facter/facts.d
   

How to do it...

In this example, we'll create a simple external fact that returns a message, as shown in the Creating custom facts recipe:

1. Create the file /etc/facter/facts.d/local.txt with the following contents:

   model=ED-209

2. Run the following...