Facter is meant to stand alone and apart from Puppet. However, Facter often runs inside Puppet and all custom facts included in the stdlib module will almost always be evaluated in the context of Puppet and Facter working together.
Still, we don't want to write custom facts that blow up in the users
face if Puppet is not loaded in memory. This is often the case if the user
runs facter
without also supplying the --puppet
flag.
Ah! But Jeff, the custom fact won't be in the $LOAD_PATH
unless the user supplies --facter
! You might say…
Not (always) true I say! If the user happens to have a CWD of
<modulepath>/stdlib/lib
then the facts will
automatically be evaluated and blow up.
In any event, it's pretty easy to write a fact that has no value if Puppet is not loaded. Simply do it like this:
Facter.add(:node_vardir) do setcode do # This will be nil if Puppet is not available. Facter::Util::PuppetSettings.with_puppet do Puppet[:vardir] end end end
The Facter::Util::PuppetSettings.with_puppet
method accepts a
block and yields to it only if the Puppet library is loaded. If the Puppet
library is not loaded, then the method silently returns nil
which Facter interprets as an undefined fact value. The net effect is that
the fact won't be set.