factd

Factd is a fact reporting daemon, similar to puppetlabs facte. It is intended to be run as a process on the target system, via systemd. Note that in a container it will need some extra privilages and mounts to be able to access the host information

Facts are served to an http endpoint, as well as prometheus metrics and pprof data.

factd is under heavy development, expect breaking changes until v1.0 factd currently is only fully supported in linux, please submit pull requests that change this.

Config

All command line options can also be given in a factd.yml config file or as env vars prepended with FACTD_

Environmental Variables

As factd uses gopsutil under the hood for some functionality you should also be aware of it's env vars

• HOST_ETC - specify alternative path to /etc directory
• HOST_PROC - specify alternative path to /proc mountpoint
• HOST_SYS - specify alternative path to /sys mountpoint
• HOST_VAR - specify alternative path to /var mountpoint

Containers

Although a container is provided it is not the preferred way to run factd.

docker run -it --name factd --rm --privileged --ipc=host --net=host --pid=host -e HOST=/host -v /run:/run -v /var/log:/var/log -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime -v /:/host tomwhiston/factd:latest

There are some things to be aware of when running in a container:

• It is a super privilaged container in every way!
• The results you get will differ from running it on the host in a few ways
  • Host filesystem mounted at /host and env vars set to use this
  • Extra volumes
  • Different $PATH
  • Different Host Id
  • Different User
  • IsVirtual true in container (docker only)
  • VirtualizationRole guest in container (docker only)
  • VirtualizationSystem set in container (docker only)

Check the taskfile for running and building the container with the awesome, and daemonless, podman

Adding New Plugins/Formatters

Use the tmpl command to generate new plugin boilerplate. See tmpl --help for more details.

Adding New Commands

Use cobra for command boilerplate When adding new commands bind your (p)flags to viper and use viper and not the cmd for data, this allows the user to supply a configuration file supplying flag values. gopsutil env vars are also available from viper.

Factd/Facter Parity

Factd aims to have as much parity with facter's modern facts feature set as is reasonable, note that this does not extend to the names or structure of the facts returned.

facter	factd	notes
augeas
disks	disks
dmi
ec2_metadata
ec2_userdata
env_windows_installdir		windows not supported
facterversion	version
filesystems	disks
gce
identity	user
is_virtual	host
kernel	host
kernelmajversion	host
kernelrelease	host
kernelversion	host
ldom		solaris not supported
load_averages	load
memory	mem
mountpoints	disks
networking	net	partially implemented
os	host
partitions	disks
path	host
processors	cpu
ruby
solaris_zones		solaris not supported
ssh
system_profiler		osx not supported
system_uptime	host
timezone	host
virtual	host
xen
zfs_featurenumbers		solaris not supported
zfs_version		solaris not supported
zpool_featurenumbers		solaris not supported
zpool_version		solaris not supported

Additional Facts

In addition to the facter facts mentioned above factd provides

name	notes
docker	containers & images

Monitoring

/metrics Prometheus Endpoint

You can disable prometheus monitoring by passing --prometheus=false

/debug/pprof pprof Endpoints

You can disable pprof by passing --pprof=false

/healthz Endpoint