Help writing a custom fact

[frap]

I'm trying to write a custom fact for Puppet, but I have next to no Ruby experience. I think what I'm trying to do is straightforward, but because of Facter's key => value pairs model, it's kind of difficult.

Each hosts I want the fact for has websites in /var/www/html/ - I want to be able to do the following:

Have a fact called "websites" that will tell me how many folders there are under /var/www/html

Have a list of facts called website_1, website_2, website_3 which will tell me the names of these sites. Either that or have an array (if that's even possible) called website_names which will then list all the websites under that key.

If possible, I'd like the fact to be able to figure out how many websites there are with the original "websites" fact and limit the number of websites underneath.

Any help gratefully appreciated.

[Walter Heck]

I think you might be using the wrong tool for the job, but we need a
little bit more information to determine that: What do you want to do
with these facts once you have them in puppet?

If you are managing websites with puppet, you should probably manage
the folders themselves with puppet, removing your need for the fact.

cheers,

Walter

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[Michael Stahnke]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 11:00 PM, Walter Heck <walte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think you might be using the wrong tool for the job, but we need a
> little bit more information to determine that: What do you want to do
> with these facts once you have them in puppet?
>
> If you are managing websites with puppet, you should probably manage
> the folders themselves with puppet, removing your need for the fact.
>
> cheers,
>
> Walter
>
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 10:16 PM, frap <l...@brig.gs> wrote:
>> I'm trying to write a custom fact for Puppet, but I have next to no Ruby
>> experience. I think what I'm trying to do is straightforward, but because of
>> Facter's key => value pairs model, it's kind of difficult.

Could you do something like website_count => XXXX ? Then you might not
need to list them out. Either way, you can comma separate strings and
use things like split in Puppet (and maybe stdlib) to do some things.
I used dozens of custom facts in my environment in the past, so I
can't tell you if this is *wrong* way per say. It's a way. Go for it
until you find something better.

Also note, if you're not really into writing ruby facts, you could use
something in facts.d that is provided via stdlib. That just reads
values from files. You could write your fact in whatever language you
want, run it in cron or something and then have it dump results from
/etc/facter/facts.d or /etc/puppetlabs/facter/facts.d.

stdlib: http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/stdlib

[Eduardo A Muñoz]

Answering the requirement you could do something like.

Facter.add("websites_number") do 

 setcode do

   websites = %x{/bin/ls $websitesdir}.split("\n")

   0.upto(websites - 1).each do |n|

     Facter.add("website_#{n}") do

       setcode do

           websites[n]

        end

     end

     websites.size

 end

end