Getting information about the environment

"In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French. I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language."—Mark Twain

Local knowledge can be very useful. Often in a Puppet manifest, you need to know some local information about the machine you're on. Facter is the tool that accompanies Puppet to provide a standard way of getting information ('facts') from the environment about things like:

  • Operating system
  • Memory size
  • Architecture
  • Processor count

Note

To see a complete list of the facts available on your system, run the command: # facter

While it can be handy to get this information from the command line, the real power of Facter lies in being able to access these facts in your Puppet ...

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