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 gem with a facter-like interface, for use in ruby applications

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 to install some tools. You should have at least 2GB of memory.

• install CMake - http://www.cmake.org/download/, choose the option to add it to the system PATH
• install MinGW-w64 - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/latest/download, recommended settings: 4.8.2, posix, seh/dwarf

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 - http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/latest/download

  .\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 boost.locale.iconv=off
  

• build yaml-cpp - https://code.google.com/p/yaml-cpp/downloads

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

Note that OpenSSL isn't needed on Windows. More detailed notes are available in WINDOWS.md.

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 clone --recursive 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 cfacter, 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 ..

Before building the gem, install the cfacter bundle:

$ cd gem
$ bundle install

Build

To build cfacter, use 'make':

$ cd release
$ make

To build cfacter with debug information:

$ cd debug
$ make

To build the cfacter gem:

$ cd gem
$ rake gem

The gem will be created in the gem/pkg directory.

Run

You can run cfacter from where it was built:

$ release/bin/cfacter

For a debug build:

$ debug/bin/cfacter

Test

You can run cfacter 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 gem tests:

$ cd gem
$ rspec

Install

You can install cfacter into your system:

$ cd release
$ make && sudo make install

By default, cfacter will install files into /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib, and /usr/local/include. If the project is configured with Ruby in the PATH, cfacter.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 cfacter into ~/bin, ~/lib, and ~/include.

To install the gem (assumes gem is already built):

$ cd gem
$ gem install pkg/cfacter*.gem

Uninstall

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

$ sudo xargs rm < release/install_manifest.txt

To uninstall the gem:

$ gem uninstall cfacter

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.