Feature #15596: External fact location should be configurable via an environment variable - Facter - Puppet Labs

Feature #15596

External fact location should be configurable via an environment variable

Added by Andrew Parker 11 months ago. Updated 10 months ago.

Status:

In Topic Branch Pending Review

Start date:

07/18/2012

Priority:

Normal

Due date:

Assignee:

Evan Pierce

% Done:

Category:

Target version:

2.0.0

Keywords:

Affected Facter version:

Branch:

https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter/pull/306

Description

Right now the external facts are hard coded to two directories (on unix) and one directory (on windows). The user has no control over these unless they pass a command line argument to facter. However, the command line argument can only specify a single directory. This makes it a less than ideal user experience when trying to use facter as a systems tool.

Instead of these hard coded paths and a single way of overriding, we should change it so that facter uses an environment variable as a path of directories to look for external facts.

export FACTER_PATH=/usr/share/facts:/usr/local/facts
facter   # will look in /usr/share/facts first and then in /usr/local/facts.

Any facts that are found earlier in the path are more important than facts found later in the path.

Open questions:

What should be done if FACTER_PATH is not set?
If we have FACTER_PATH, then do we need any command line options for controlling the path?
If there are command line options, how do they interact with a set FACTER_PATH
Can a user effectively remove all external facts if they set FACTER_PATH=''?

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