Developing/Testing Custom Facts for Puppet

An important part of any puppet deployment are custom facts. Facts identify specific attributes about the machines in your environment. For example, a fact might indicate if a specific application is installed, another may identify the version of that application. Some facts are built in and available by default, for example OS information. Other facts are too specific to your environment and facts must be created and deployed. One of the best ways to create facts in puppet is to use custom facts. These facts are written in Ruby scripts using the Facter API.

I am a senior architect at a SaaS software company. I oversee the monitoring of all of our production hardware, database and other equipment, virtual and physical. We use puppet to automatically deploy all monitoring technology. As soon as new machines register with puppet (part of the initial image), our custom facts run. These facts are used to determine what needs to be monitored, what needs to be deployed to the new machine and what configuration needs to be updated in other places.

Structure of a Custom Fact in Ruby

Custom facts have a specific structure. Adherence to the structure is important as the whole fact does not necessarily execute all at once, or even in a single context. The structure is as follows

Facter.add(<fact name>) do
   confine :<someFact> => '<some value>'
   confine :<someOtherFact> do |f|
       f == '<value 1> || f == '<value 2>'
   end