Setting facts as environment variables

Another handy way to get information into Puppet and Facter is to pass it using environment variables. Any environment variable whose name starts with FACTER_ will be interpreted as a fact. For example, ask facter the value of hello using the following command:

[root@cookbook ~]# facter -p hello
Hello, world

Now, override the value with an environment variable and ask again:

[root@cookbook ~]# FACTER_hello='Howdy!' facter -p hello
Howdy!

It works just as well with Puppet, so let's run through an example.

How to do it...

In this example, we'll set a fact using an environment variable:

1. Keep the node definition for cookbook the same as our last example:

node cookbook...