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resource_facts

Provide current state of all puppet resources as a huge structured fact
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9,263 latest version

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Version information

  • 0.1.1 (latest)
  • 0.1.0
released May 18th 2015
This version is compatible with:
  • Puppet Enterprise 2017.2.x, 2017.1.x, 2016.5.x, 2016.4.x
  • Puppet 4.x
  • ,

Start using this module

  • r10k or Code Manager
  • Bolt
  • Manual installation
  • Direct download

Add this module to your Puppetfile:

mod 'danieldreier-resource_facts', '0.1.1'
Learn more about managing modules with a Puppetfile

Add this module to your Bolt project:

bolt module add danieldreier-resource_facts
Learn more about using this module with an existing project

Manually install this module globally with Puppet module tool:

puppet module install danieldreier-resource_facts --version 0.1.1

Direct download is not typically how you would use a Puppet module to manage your infrastructure, but you may want to download the module in order to inspect the code.

Download

Documentation

danieldreier/resource_facts — version 0.1.1 May 18th 2015

Resource Facts

Overview

This puppet module provides a resources fact that contains the current state of resources as would be displayed using the puppet resource command on each resource type.

Module Description

Resource facts provide structured facts that described the current state of resources you can enumerate with the puppet resource command.

For example, to set the resource fact to list all mounts and all users:

resource_facts::resource { 'mount': }
resource_facts::resource { 'user': }

The mounts would be listed in a structured fact something like:

{
  "resources": {
    "mount": {
      "/": {
        "name": "/",
        "ensure": "mounted",
        "device": "/dev/mapper/localhost-root",
        "blockdevice": null,
        "fstype": "ext3",
        "options": "errors=remount-ro",
        "pass": "1",
        "atboot": null,
        "dump": "0",
        "target": "/etc/fstab"
      },
      "/boot": {
        "name": "/boot",
        "ensure": "mounted",
        "device": "UUID=03f2131a-a980-43ec-9c35-3001f440830c",
        "blockdevice": null,
        "fstype": "ext2",
        "options": "defaults",
        "pass": "2",
        "atboot": null,
        "dump": "0",
        "target": "/etc/fstab"
      }
    }
  }
}

Why?

Resource facts allow puppet to be aware of unmanaged resources. If you're using the Puppet 4 DSL / future parser, you can then define behavior, such as removing unmanaged users, or creating noop versions of the resources in order to make them queryable in puppetdb.

Conditional Behavior

For example, say you want to enable the attr2 mount option if / is an XFS filesystem, but not on EXT4 filesystems, because attr2 isn't a valid EXT4 mount option. Using resource facts, you can use the $::resources['mount']['/'] hash, check what $::resources['mount']['/']['fstype'] is, then create a new resource with the desired mount options.

PuppetDB Queryability

All this data ends up in PuppetDB, so if you track packages with resource facts you could (for example) use puppetdbquery to search for all the nodes that actually have openssl installed, not just the ones that manage it with Puppet.

Discover Resources

If you use the excellent puppetlabs-aws module, you may have noticed that some AWS resources can be enumerated using puppet resource but (frustratingly) can't get to that data. For example, say you'd like to assign an available, unassigned elastic IP to a node. Problem is that puppet doesn't know what that IP is during the compile, even though puppet resource shows it. With resource facts, you can simply access the resources structured fact, iterate over the elastic IP resources with puppet 4 iteration, and pick an unused one.

Selective Purge

Do you want to selectively purge resources? For example, perhaps you'd like to remove AWS ec2 instances that don't conform to a certain tagging standard. You can't just enable purge on all unmanaged ec2_instance resources because no individual node is aware of all of them, and you're willing to tolerate manually-provisioned nodes so long as they comply with your tagging rules.

If you track ec2_instance resources with resource facts, and you grok puppet 4 iteration, you're in luck. You can iterate over the resources['ec2_instance'] structured fact, select resources that do not include the correct data in the tags parameter, and define new ec2_instance resources with those nodes set to ensure => absent.

Getting Started

Install the danieldreier/resource_facts module, then define which resources you want to track:

puppet module install danieldreier/resource_facts

resource_facts:resource { 'mount': }

After running the puppet code above, you can run facter -p resources to see what resources are tracked. If you're using puppet apply to do this, you may need to set a custom fact path, something like:

puppet config set factpath /var/lib/puppet/lib/facter:/etc/puppet/modules/resource_facts/lib/facter

Caveats

  • This module several seconds to facter run time if you track all resources with resource facts
  • PuppetDB will store a lot more data if you use a lot of resource facts
  • resource facts can only track facts that are enumerable
  • Keep in mind what secrets may be put in puppetdb; the user resource shows password hashes

If you write code expecting a resource fact to exist and that causes compilation to fail, that can prevent the resource fact to never be configured, permanently breaking compiles. You must code defensively and handle the case where the resource is not listed in the $::resources hash yet.