Native Facter

An implementation of facter functionality in C++11, providing:

• a shared library which gather facts about the system
• an executable for standalone command line usage
• a ruby file to enable require 'facter'.

Please see our extensibility document to learn more about extending native facter using custom and external facts.

Build Requirements

• GCC 4.8+ or Clang 5.0+ (OSX)
• CMake >= 2.8.12
• Boost C++ Libraries >= 1.54
• yaml-cpp >= 0.5.1

Optional Build Libraries

• OpenSSL - enables SSH fingerprinting facts.
• libblkid (Linux only) - enables the partitions fact.
• libcurl >= 7.18.0 - enables facts that perform HTTP requests.

Initial Setup

Note: Testing custom facts requires Ruby 1.9+ with libruby built as a dynamic library; that often implies development builds of Ruby.

Setup on Fedora 20

The following will install all required tools and libraries:

yum install cmake boost-devel openssl-devel yaml-cpp-devel libblkid-devel libcurl-devel gcc-c++ make

Setup on Mac OSX Mavericks (homebrew)

This assumes Clang is installed and the system OpenSSL libraries will be used.

The following will install all required libraries:

brew install cmake boost yaml-cpp

Setup on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty)

The following will install most required tools and libraries:

apt-get install build-essential cmake libboost-all-dev libssl-dev libyaml-cpp-dev libblkid-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

Setup on Windows

MinGW-w64 is used for full C++11 support, and Chocolatey can be used to install. You should have at least 2GB of memory for compilation.

• install CMake

• install MinGW-w64

    choco install mingw --params "/threads:win32"
  

For the remaining tasks, build commands can be executed in the shell from Start > MinGW-w64 project > Run Terminal

• select an install location for dependencies, such as C:\tools or cmake\release\ext; we'll refer to it as $install

• build Boost

    .\bootstrap mingw
    .\b2 toolset=gcc --build-type=minimal install --prefix=$install --with-program_options --with-system --with-filesystem --with-date_time --with-thread --with-regex --with-log --with-locale --with-chrono boost.locale.iconv=off
  

• build yaml-cpp

    cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$install -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$install .
    mingw32-make install
  

In Powershell:

choco install cmake 7zip.commandline -y
choco install mingw --params "/threads:win32" -y
$env:PATH = "C:\tools\mingw64\bin;$env:PATH"
$install = "C:\tools"

(New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("https://downloads.sourceforge.net/boost/boost_1_54_0.7z", "$pwd/boost_1_54_0.7z")
7za x boost_1_54_0.7z
pushd boost_1_54_0
.\bootstrap mingw
.\b2 toolset=gcc --build-type=minimal install --prefix=$install --with-program_options --with-system --with-filesystem --with-date_time --with-thread --with-regex --with-log --with-locale --with-chrono boost.locale.iconv=off
popd

(New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("https://yaml-cpp.googlecode.com/files/yaml-cpp-0.5.1.tar.gz", "$pwd/yaml-cpp-0.5.1.tar.gz")
7za x yaml-cpp-0.5.1.tar.gz
7za x yaml-cpp-0.5.1.tar
pushd yaml-cpp-0.5.1
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$install" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="$install" .
mingw32-make install
popd

Note that OpenSSL isn't needed on Windows.

Pre-Build

All of the following examples start by assuming the current directory is the root of the repo.

Note the use of git submodules, so use git submodule update --init to ensure the submodules are populated.

On Windows, add -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=\<binary install path\> -DBOOST_STATIC=ON to the cmake invocation.

Before building facter, use cmake to generate build files:

$ mkdir release
$ cd release
$ cmake ..

To generate build files with debug information:

$ mkdir debug
$ cd debug
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..

Build

To build facter, use 'make':

$ cd release
$ make

To build facter with debug information:

$ cd debug
$ make

Run

You can run facter from where it was built:

$ release/bin/facter

For a debug build:

$ debug/bin/facter

Test

You can run facter tests using the test target:

$ cd release
$ make test

For a debug build:

$ cd debug
$ make test

For verbose test output, run ctest instead of using the test target:

$ cd release
$ ctest -V

To run ruby tests (make install required):

$ cd lib
$ rspec

Install

You can install facter into your system:

$ cd release
$ make && sudo make install

By default, facter will install files into /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib, and /usr/local/include. If the project is configured with Ruby in the PATH, facter.rb will be installed to that Ruby's vendor dir.

To install to a different location, set the install prefix:

$ cd release
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~ ..
$ make clean install

This would install facter into ~/bin, ~/lib, and ~/include.

Ruby Usage

Using the Ruby API requires that facter.rb is installed into the Ruby load path, as done in the previous install steps.

    require 'facter'
    
    # Use the Facter API...
    puts "kernel: #{Facter.value(:kernel)}"

Uninstall

Run the following command to remove files that were previously installed:

$ sudo xargs rm < release/install_manifest.txt

Documentation

To generate API documentation, install doxygen 1.8.7 or later.

$ cd lib
$ doxygen

To view the documentation, open lib/html/index.html in a web browser.