Book Image

Puppet 5 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Thomas Uphill
Book Image

Puppet 5 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Thomas Uphill

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system that automates all your IT configurations, giving you control of managing each node. Puppet 5 Cookbook will take you through Puppet's latest and most advanced features, including Docker containers, Hiera, and AWS Cloud Orchestration. Updated with the latest advancements and best practices, this book delves into various aspects of writing good Puppet code, which includes using Puppet community style, checking your manifests with puppet-lint, and learning community best practices with an emphasis on real-world implementation. You will learn to set up, install, and create your first manifests with version control, and also learn about various sysadmin tasks, including managing configuration files, using Augeas, and generating files from snippets and templates. As the book progresses, you'll explore virtual resources and use Puppet's resource scheduling and auditing features. In the concluding chapters, you'll walk through managing applications and writing your own resource types, providers, and external node classifiers. By the end of this book, you will have learned to report, log, and debug your system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Adding external facts


The Creating custom facts recipe describes how to add extra facts written in Ruby. You can also create facts from simple files or from scripts with external facts instead. External facts may be written in YAML, JSON, or txt format.

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

message="Hello, world"

Getting ready

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

You'll 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 /etc/facter/facts.d/local.txt file with the following contents:
model=ED-209
  1. Run the following command:
[root@cookbook ~]# facter model
ED-209
  1. Well, that was easy! You can add more facts to the same file, or other files, of course, as follows:
model=ED-209
builder=OCP
directives...