Get fact for all managed servers

Question

We're managing our servers from a central Puppet server. I need to get the value of a custom fact (specifying the datacenter/location of each server) for all of our managed servers.

I know that I could use pdsh to query the fact locally on each server, but there should be a way to get the information on the Puppet server (since the information is already being stored in PuppetDB).

Answer 1

PuppetDB has a REST API from which you can query facts like this:

curl -Gs "http://localhost:8080/pdb/query/v4/facts/YOUR_FACT"

Replace YOUR_FACT with the actual name of your custom fact (or any other fact).

The output is a JSON document. To get a list mapping the FQDN of the server to the value of the fact you can use jq like this:

curl -Gs "http://localhost:8080/pdb/query/v4/facts/YOUR_FACT" |
  jq -r '.[]|[.certname, .value]|@tsv'

That will produce output like

bar2342.example.org	abc
baz13.example.org	def
foo.example.org	ghi
...

Use column to get the columns aligned properly:

curl -Gs "http://localhost:8080/pdb/query/v4/facts/YOUR_FACT" |
  jq -r '.[]|[.certname, .value]|@tsv' |
  column -ts $'\t'

Output:

bar2342.example.org  abc
baz13.example.org    def
foo.example.org      ghi
...