custom puppet facts

[vioilly]

I have written a custom puppet fact using a ruby script. It is very simple - it just adds a string to a fact. However I have written a module but it appears to me that the custom fact has been applied to all my machines without me specifying any node definitions. When I run a puppet agent --test --noop, I see the custom fact appear in /var/lib/puppet/lib/facter.

Info: Loading facts in /var/lib/puppet/lib/facter/addfacter.rb

I checked my nodes by running facter and it doesn't appear, unless I run facter -p

I only want my custom fact to run on a specific node via a definition


My question is, do custom facts scripts run by default regardless of any node definitions? If not, what am I doing wrong?


Many thanks - Oli

[Stefan Goethals]

Facts automatically get distributed to all nodes with pluginsync.

You need to write them in such a way that they will only create the fact on the nodes that need it.

Stefan - Zipkid - Goethals

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[Jonathan Proulx]

You can also use the puppetlabs stdlib module which provides an easy
ad-hoc way of defining arbitrary facts on a system using text files in
/etc/facter/facts.d/

more info: https://puppetlabs.com/blog/module-of-the-week-puppetlabsstdlib-puppetlabs-standard-library-part-3

Many facts are best discovered pragmatically, but something are just
arbitrary which is where you want soemthing like this. For example we
have custom facts that pragmatically how the serial console of a
server should be setup based on what hardware and connections are
discovered, but use facts.d on workstatons we mange so users can self
select a la cart configurations suchas if they want NFS automounted
and certain other optional configuration packages.

-Jon

[Oliver Leach]

I've read up on this a bit more and I am now beginning to understand how custom facts work. It did surprise me actually that all custom facts get instantiated at runtime - I also understand that you can write your ruby scripts in a way that your custom facts scripts do not necessarily need to apply changes to your nodes. But this appears to be an overhead to me. Yes, I can work around it, but i would rather not have to have the overhead. Why is this designed this way?

Reading this in detail helped me understand the issue

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/custom_facts.html


Thanks for your reply.

-Oli