Starting in Puppet 2.6, its possible to store all facts in a couchdb database.

Installation for CentOS 5.x

1. ensure that epel, base and updates yum repos are enabled:
2. install couchdb
   

   yum install couchdb

3. ensure that rubygem is installed

   yum install rubygems

4. install gcc
   

   yum install gcc

5. Install couchrest 1.0.0 (note: 1.0.1 does not work with ruby 1.8.5)
   

    gem install couchrest -v1.0.0

6. ensure that a 2.6.x version of puppet is installed (I recommend 2.6.3)

Configure:

• configure the couchdb facts terminus in puppet.conf
  

  #puppet.conf
  [master]
    couchdb_url=http://127.0.0.1:5984/puppet
    facts_terminus=couch

• Configure couch to bind to 0.0.0.0

  [httpd]
  port = 5984
  bind_address = 0.0.0.0

• start couchdb – I recommend starting it in the forground so that you can monitor the http requests.
  

  couchdb

• start up puppetmasterd in the foreground
  

  puppet master --no-daemonize --verbose

Create facts:

• run a puppet agent
  

  puppet agent -t

• run a few more to create more data to view in couch

  puppet agent -t --certname foo
  puppet agent -t --certname bar
  puppet agent -t --certname baz

Profit!

Now facts from all of our clients will be stored as documents in couchdb.

Advantages:

1. Facts can be aggregated to a separate service to be queried.
2. We can now access a clients fact information using Couch's RESTful interface.

To view the facts documents in couchdb, access the document managment interface of couchdb;

http://puppet-test:5984/_utils/

To acess facts with curl:

curl --get http://localhost:5984/puppet/foo
curl --get http://localhost:5984/puppet/bar
curl --get http://localhost:5984/puppet/baz

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