Puppet Enterprise 2021.1 ships with Facter 4 as the default Facter version, and with it comes a plethora of new capabilities. We are happy to introduce some new facts for customers to use the full power of Facter. However, before upgrading, we recommend checking for differences in fact values from Puppet 6 to Puppet 7. That’s where the puppet facts diff command comes in.

Where could I be affected?

With some of the fact values changing from Puppet 6 to Puppet 7, it could have repercussions on any tests using facts, stored filter queries you may use in Puppet Enterprise, or external services using our Puppet APIs.

What do I need to do?

Review the recommendations and changes on our Upgrading from Puppet 6 to Puppet 7 documentation page for instructions on how to use puppet facts diff to see if there are any output differences, so that you can unlock the full power of Facter 4 in your infrastructure.

We hope you enjoy the changes we’ve introduced in Facter 4. We always strive to continuously improve; if you have any feedback or suggestions, there are a few ways to reach our team:

• You can contribute directly to the Facter project (please read our CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting any pull requests)
• Open a ticket under our Facter Jira project
• Drop a card on the Puppet Idea Portal
• Or reach our Product team at [email protected]

Beth Glenfield is a Product Manager at Puppet.

Learn more

• Learn more about Puppet Enterprise 2021.1 here.
• For more details regarding Facter 4, you can check out our documentation.
• Video tutorials for the new features: structured custom facts, fact caching, fact blocking and fact profiling.