Simple facts with Puppet

It’s not that hard

When I first started looking at facter it was magic, things just happened and when I entered facter a list of variables appeared and all of these variables are available to use within puppet modules / manifests to help make life easier. After approximately 2 years of thinking how good they were and how nice it would be to have my own I finally took the time to look at it and try to work it out….

For those of you that don’t know, facter is a framework for providing facts about a host system that puppet can use to make intelligent decisions about what to do and can be used to determine the operating system, release of it, local IPs etc etc. This gives you flexibility in puppet to do things like choose what packages to install based on Linux distribution or insert the local IP address into a template.

Writing Facts

So, Lets look at a standard fact that comes with it so you can see the complexity involved an understand why after glancing at it I never went much further.

# Fact: interfaces
#
# Purpose:
#
# Resolution:
#
# Caveats:
#

# interfaces.rb
# Try to get additional Facts about the machine's network interfaces
#
# Original concept Copyright (C) 2007 psychedelys <psychedelys@gmail.com>
# Update and *BSD support (C) 2007 James Turnbull <james@lovedthanlost.net>
#

require 'facter/util/ip'

# Note that most of this only works on a fixed list of platforms; notably, Darwin
# is missing.

Facter.add(:interfaces) do
  confine :kernel => Facter::Util::IP.supported_platforms
  setcode do
    Facter::Util::IP.get_interfaces.collect { |iface| Facter::Util::IP.alphafy(iface) }.join(",")
  end
end

Facter::Util::IP.get_interfaces.each do |interface|

  # Make a fact for each detail of each interface.  Yay.
  #   There's no point in confining these facts, since we wouldn't be able to create
  # them if we weren't running on a supported platform.
  %w{ipaddress ipaddress6 macaddress netmask}.each do |label|
    Facter.add(label + "_" + Facter::Util::IP.alphafy(interface)) do
      setcode do
        Facter::Util::IP.get_interface_value(interface, label)
      end
    end
  end
end

This is stolen, and all it does is provide a comma separated list of interfaces as follows: eth0, eth1 etc etc

Now, when I started looking at facter I knew no ruby and it was a bit daunting, but alas I learnt some and never bothered looking at facter again until my boss managed to simplify one down to it’s bear essentials, which is the one line…

Facter.add("bob") { setcode { "bob" } }

At this point onwards all you need to do is learn some ruby to make sure you can populate that appropriately or, use bash to get the details and populate the fact, in the next example I just grab the pid of apache from ps

apachepid=`ps -fu apache | grep apache | awk '{ print $2}'`

Facter.add(:apachepid) {
	setcode { apachepid }
}

So if you know bash, and you can copy and paste you can do something like the above, now this is ruby, so you can do a lot more complex things but that’s not for today

Okay, so now something more complex is needed…. What if you’re in Amazon and use the Tags on your EC2 instances and you want to use them in puppet ? well you can just query amazon and get a result and use that, although that will take forever and 1 day to run as AWS is not the quickest. This is an issue we had to over come, so we decided to run a script that would query amazon in it’s own time and populate the tags onto the file system, at which point we can read them quickly with facter.

So first, a shell script.

#!/bin/bash
source /path/to/aws/config.inc

# Grab all tags
IFS=$'\n'
for i in $($EC2_HOME/bin/ec2-describe-tags --filter "resource-type=instance" --filter "resource-id=`facter ec2_instance_id`" | grep -v cloudformation | cut -f 4-)
do
        key=$(echo $i | cut -f1)
        value=$(echo $i | cut -f2-)

        if [ ! -d "/opt/facts/tags/" ]
        then
                mkdir -p /opt/facts/tags
        fi
        if [ -n $value ]
        then
                echo $value > /opt/facts/tags/$key
		/usr/bin/logger set fact $key to $value
        fi
done

So this isn’t the best script in the world, but it is simple, it pulls a set of tags out of amazon and basically stores them in a directory where the file name is the tag name and the content is the tag value.
So now we have the facts locally with bash, something we’re all a bit more familiar with we can then take something like facter which is alien ruby and force some bash inside it but still generate facts that provide value

tags=`ls /opt/facts/tags/`

tags.each do |keys|
        value = `cat /opt/facts/tags/#{keys}`
        fact = "ec2_#{keys.chomp}"
        Facter.add(fact) { setcode { value.chomp } }
end

The first thing we do is produce a list of tags (directory list) and then we use some ruby to loop through it and yet more bash to get the values.
None of this is complicated, and hopefully these few examples are enough to encourage people to start writing facts even if they are an abomination to the ruby language but at least you have value without needing to spend time understanding or learning ruby.

Summary

Facts aren’t that hard to write, and thanks to being ruby you can make them as complicated as you like or as simple as you like, and you can even break into bash as needed. So now a caveat, although you can write facts quickly with this half bash/ruby mix by far, just learning ruby will make life easier in the long run, you can then start to incorporate some more complex logic into the facts to provide more value within puppet.

A useful link for facter incase you feel like reading more

Category:

Linux, Puppet, Ruby

Tags:

facter, linux, Puppet Labs

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