peterhoeg / fetchfact

A Puppet module for downloading facts for facter-dot-d from an external source

fetchfact

This module fetches a JSON, YAML or text file from a defined URL, and stores it in /etc/facter/facts.d. From there, its contents can be picked up by facter-dot-d and thus be available as custom facts to Facter.

Warning

Do not retrieve facts from untrusted sources. fetchfact does not do any sanitization or filtering on the retrieved facts. If your source provides you with facts that override other custom facts, this module does not protect you against that. If in doubt, retrieve facts only from sources that you yourself control and/or trust.

Example

To fetch a dynamically generated JSON document from http://service.example.com/something?foo=bar and store it in /etc/facter/facts.d/something.json, put the following in your manifest:

include fetchfact

$url = 'http://service.example.com/something?foo=bar'
$factfile = 'something.json'

fetchfact::fetch { '$filename':
  url => $url,
  factfile => $filename
}

Note that fetchfact will ensure that the required JSON Ruby module is installed if your filename ends in .json.

Normally, the lookup will occur only once for every node. In order to purge and refresh the downloaded facts, delete the fact file and wait for the next agent run.

License

ASL 2.0.

Contact

Contact [e-mail] for any comments and questions about this module.

Support

Please report issues on GitHub.