sysfacts

sysfacts is a system information collector.

It can be used standalone or as a library. In order to achieve its goals, sysfacts tries to leverage existing cross-platform python libraries.

Installation

pipx

The recommended installation method is pipx. More specifically, you can install sysfacts for your user with:

pipx install sysfacts

The above command will create a virtual environment in ~/.local/pipx/venvs/sysfacts and add the sysfacts script in ~/.local/bin.

In case you need to run sysfacts just once, without installing it, you can do it with

pipx run sysfacts

This way, pipx will create a temporary virtual environment, install sysfacts, run it and cleanup afterwards.

pip

Alternatively you can use good old pip but this is more fragile than pipx.

pip install --user sysfacts

As a dependency for another project

If you use poetry, you can use:

poetry add sysfacts

Usage

CLI application

On the CLI application there are three options for the output format:

• colored, pretty-printed JSON (the default)
• machine readable JSON blob
• YAML

sysfacts --help
# JSON output
sysfacts                      # colored + pretty-printed
sysfacts --no-color           # pretty-printed
sysfacts --blob               # machine readable
# YAML output
sysfacts --yaml
sysfacts --yaml --no-color

API

The main function is collect_facts() which returns a python dictionary.

from sysfacts import collect_facts

facts = collect_facts()

Alternative projects

Well, this is not really unique, since there are several similar projects out there

• puppet's facter
• chef's ohai is written in ruby.
• datadog's gohai is written in go.
• if you have ansible installed you can also use ansible local -m setup.