Native Facter
An implementation of facter functionality in C++11, providing:
- a shared library which gather facts about the system
- an executable for standalone command line usage
- a ruby file to enable
require 'facter'.
Please see our extensibility document to learn more
about extending native facter using custom and external facts.
Build Requirements
- GCC 4.8+ or Clang 5.0+ (OSX)
- CMake >= 3.2.2
- Boost C++ Libraries >= 1.54
- yaml-cpp >= 0.5.1
- leatherman >= 1.0.0
- cpp-hocon >= 0.1.0
Optional Build Libraries
- OpenSSL - enables SSH fingerprinting facts.
- libblkid (Linux only) - enables the partitions fact.
- libcurl >= 7.18.0 - enables facts that perform HTTP requests.
Initial Setup
Note: Testing custom facts requires Ruby 1.9+ with libruby built as a dynamic library; that often implies development builds of Ruby.
Setup on Fedora 23
The following will install all required tools and libraries:
dnf install boost-devel openssl-devel yaml-cpp-devel libblkid-devel libcurl-devel gcc-c++ make wget tar cmake
Setup on Mac OSX El Capitan (homebrew)
This assumes Clang is installed and the system OpenSSL libraries will be used.
The following will install all required libraries:
brew install cmake boost yaml-cpp
Setup on Ubuntu 15.10 (Trusty)
The following will install most required tools and libraries:
apt-get install build-essential libboost-all-dev libssl-dev libyaml-cpp-dev libblkid-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev wget tar cmake
Setup on FreeBSD 10
The following will install most required tools and libraries:
pkg install git ruby21 cmake boost-all yaml-cpp gcc49
Setup on Windows
MinGW-w64 is used for full C++11 support, and Chocolatey can be used to install. You should have at least 2GB of memory for compilation.
For the remaining tasks, build commands can be executed in the shell from Start > MinGW-w64 project > Run Terminal
-
select an install location for dependencies, such as C:\tools or cmake\release\ext; we'll refer to it as $install
-
build Boost
.\bootstrap mingw .\b2 toolset=gcc --build-type=minimal install --prefix=$install --with-program_options --with-system --with-filesystem --with-date_time --with-thread --with-regex --with-log --with-locale --with-chrono boost.locale.iconv=off -
build yaml-cpp
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$install -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$install . mingw32-make install -
build libcurl
mingw32-make mingw32 cp -r include\curl $install\include cp -r lib\libcurl.a $install\lib
In Powershell:
choco install cmake 7zip.commandline -y
$env:PATH = "C:\Program Files\CMake\bin;$env:PATH"
choco install mingw --params "/threads:win32" -y
$env:PATH = "C:\tools\mingw64\bin;$env:PATH"
$install = "C:\tools"
(New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("https://downloads.sourceforge.net/boost/boost_1_54_0.7z", "$pwd/boost_1_54_0.7z")
7za x boost_1_54_0.7z
pushd boost_1_54_0
.\bootstrap mingw
.\b2 toolset=gcc --build-type=minimal install --prefix=$install --with-program_options --with-system --with-filesystem --with-date_time --with-thread --with-regex --with-log --with-locale --with-chrono boost.locale.iconv=off
popd
(New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("https://github.com/jbeder/yaml-cpp/archive/yaml-cpp-0.5.3.tar.gz", "$pwd/yaml-cpp-0.5.3.tar.gz")
7za x yaml-cpp-0.5.3.tar.gz
7za x yaml-cpp-0.5.3.tar
pushd yaml-cpp-yaml-cpp-0.5.3
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$install" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="$install" .
mingw32-make install
popd
(New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.42.1.zip", "$pwd/curl-7.42.1.zip")
7za x curl-7.42.1.zip
pushd curl-7.42.1
mingw32-make mingw32
cp -r include\curl $install\include
cp -r lib\libcurl.a $install\lib
popd
Note that OpenSSL isn't needed on Windows.
Setup on OpenBSD 6.0
The following will install all required tools and libraries:
pkg_add boost cmake curl g++ ruby yaml-cpp
Optionally leatherman can be installed from packages too if not
built locally.
Build and install Leatherman and cpp-hocon
Leatherman and cpp-hocon are built similar to the Pre-Build instructions below. If building on Windows, install to the same $install location used for other dependencies.
Pre-Build
All of the following examples start by assuming the current directory is the root of the repo.
On Windows, add -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=\<binary install path\> -DBOOST_STATIC=ON to the cmake invocation.
Before building facter, use cmake to generate build files:
$ mkdir release
$ cd release
$ cmake ..
To generate build files with debug information:
$ mkdir debug
$ cd debug
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
Build
To build facter, use 'make':
$ cd release
$ make
To build facter with debug information:
$ cd debug
$ make
Run
You can run facter from where it was built:
$ release/bin/facter
For a debug build:
$ debug/bin/facter
Test
If a ruby was found during configuration, execute the following command before running tests:
$ bundle install --gemfile lib/Gemfile
You can run facter tests using the test target:
$ cd release
$ make test
For a debug build:
$ cd debug
$ make test
For verbose test output, run ctest instead of using the test target:
$ cd release
$ ctest -V
Install
You can install facter into your system:
$ cd release
$ make && sudo make install
By default, facter will install files into /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib, and /usr/local/include.
If the project is configured with Ruby in the PATH, facter.rb will be installed to that Ruby's vendor dir.
The install location for facter.rb can be overridden using by setting RUBY_LIB_INSTALL.
To install to a different location, set the install prefix:
$ cd release
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~ ..
$ make clean install
This would install facter into ~/bin, ~/lib, and ~/include.
Ruby Usage
Using the Ruby API requires that facter.rb is installed into the Ruby load path, as done in the previous install steps.
require 'facter'
# Use the Facter API...
puts "kernel: #{Facter.value(:kernel)}"
Configuration
Facter can be configured via a HOCON config file of the following format:
global : {
external-dir : [ "path1", "path2" ],
custom-dir : [ "custom/path" ],
no-exernal-facts : false,
no-custom-facts : false,
no-ruby : false
}
cli : {
debug : false,
trace : true,
verbose : false,
log-level : "warn"
}
facts : {
blocklist : [ "file system", "EC2" ]
ttls : [
{ "timezone" : 30 days },
]
}
All options are respected when running Facter standalone, while calling Facter from Ruby will only load external-dir, custom-dir, and the fact-specific configuration.
The file will be loaded by default from /etc/puppetlabs/facter/facter.conf on Unix and C:\ProgramData\PuppetLabs\facter\etc\facter.conf on Windows. A different location can be specified using the --config command line option.
Elements in the blocklist are fact groupings which will not be resolved when Facter runs. Use the --list-block-group command line option to see valid blockable groups.
Elements in the ttls section are key-value pairs of fact groupings that will be cached with the duration for which to cache them. Cached facts are stored as JSON in /opt/puppetlabs/facter/cache/cached_facts on Unix and C:\ProgramData\PuppetLabs\facter\cache\cached_facts on Windows. Use the --list-cache-groups command line option to see valid cacheable groups.
Uninstall
Run the following command to remove files that were previously installed:
$ sudo xargs rm < release/install_manifest.txt
Documentation
To generate API documentation, install doxygen 1.8.7 or later.
$ cd lib
$ doxygen
To view the documentation, open lib/html/index.html in a web browser.
Debugging
If when running the tests you encounter this error message:
"could not locate a ruby library"
You may need to use a different shared ruby library in Leatherman. To do
this, run this command, where the location below is the default for a
puppet agent installation:
$ export LEATHERMAN_RUBY=/opt/puppetlabs/puppet/lib/libruby.dylib