Getting information about the environment

Often in a Puppet manifest, you need to know some local information about the machine you're on. Facter is the tool that accompanies Puppet to provide a standard way of getting information (facts) from the environment about things such as

• Operating system

• Memory size

• Architecture

• Processor count

  Note

  To see a complete list of the facts available on your system, run:

  ubuntu@cookbook:~/puppet$ sudo facter
  architecture => amd64
  augeasversion => 0.10.0
  domain => compute-1.internal
  ec2_ami_id => ami-137bcf7a
  ec2_ami_launch_index => 0
  ...
  

  While it can be handy to get this information from the command line, the real power of Facter lies in being able to access these facts in your Puppet manifests.

How to do it…

Here's an example of using Facter facts in a manifest.

1. Reference a Facter fact in your manifest like any other variable. Facts are global variables in Puppet, so should be prefixed with a double colon (::), as in the following code snippet...