Facts¶

pyinfra uses facts to determine the existing state of a remote server. Operations use this information to generate commands which alter the state. Facts are read-only and are populated at the beginning of the deploy.

Facts can be executed/tested via the command line:

# Example how to get multiple facts from a server myhost.com
pyinfra myhost.com fact server.Date server.Hostname ...

If you want to pass an argument to a fact, pass it with key=value. For example:

# See if the package 'openssh-server' is installed servers myhost.com and myhost2.com
pyinfra myhost.com,myhost2.com fact deb.DebPackage name=openssh-server

Multiple facts with arguments may be called like so:

pyinfra @local fact files.File path=setup.py files.File path=anotherfile.txt

You can leverage facts within operations like this:

from pyinfra import host
from pyinfra.facts.server import LinuxName

if host.get_fact(LinuxName) == 'Ubuntu':
    apt.packages(...)

Want a new fact? Check out the writing facts guide.