Creating custom facts programmatically

Writing static facts is fairly easy even with a low level of Ruby skills. Below is an example of a fact that returns true or false depending on whether the node has a /boot partition:

Facter.add(:has_bootfs) do
  setcode do
    if Facter.value(:mountpoints)['/boot'].nil?
      false
    else
      true
    end
  end
end

As you can see above the required information was already inside the “mountpoints” fact of Facter.

Using the fact is easy:

$ facter -p has_bootfs
true

Even though no new data is created in the above example, you can create custom facts from dynamic content using the same strategy. In the below code, I created a separate fact (“user_username_is_present”) for each user of the *NIX system excluding the system users:

require 'etc'

Etc.passwd do |entry|
  # Normal users have IDs in this range in /etc/login.defs
  if entry.uid >= 1000 and entry.uid <= 60000
    Facter.add("user_#{entry.name}_is_present") do
      setcode do
        true
      end
    end
  end
end

Using the dynamically created facts is easy:

$ facter -p user_john_is_present
true
$ facter -p user_jack_is_present

$ facter -p user_jane_is_present
true

The only limitation is that a fact cannot be created from non-existing data. In the above example, the fact for user “jack” (who doesn’t exist) gets an empty value (undef/nil) instead of returning actual boolean false. This doesn’t in practice affect how the fact can be used.