What does Fact mean in Ansible

Question

Hi Guys,

I am new in Ansible. I don't know too much about gathering_fact tasks in Ansible. Can anyone tell me what does Fact mean in Ansible?

Answer 1

Hi@akhtar,

When any new variable about the system has been discovered it’s considered to be a “fact” in the playbook. Facts are mainly used to implement conditional executions. It can also be used to get ad-hoc information about the system.

You can get facts with the following command.

$ ansible all- m setup

So when you want to extract only a part of the information, you use the setup module to filter out only the needed information.