Facter vs inxi

Facter is a free command-line tool that gathers system information such as hardware details, network settings, and operating system type and version. Puppet uses it to collect information before requesting a catalog or compiling one with puppet apply. Its built-in core facts include legacy and structured facts, though some facts do not apply to every system. Users can add custom facts in Ruby, with multiple resolutions available for determining a value, or external facts that return static data or output from a script or program. Facts can be hashes or arrays, and Boolean, numeric, and structured values retain their types. Configuration can block fact groups or cache results with time-to-live settings. Facts are available in Puppet manifests, while the --puppet option loads Puppet-specific facts from the command line. PuppetDB's API can support exploration, search, and reporting on infrastructure facts. Facter runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows and can be self-hosted. Legacy facts are omitted from default command-line output unless --show-legacy is used. Puppet's custom-fact examples require some Ruby familiarity, and facter.conf must be created manually or managed with a module.

inxi is a free, portable system-information script for GNU/Linux, usable from the command line and in IRC. Its options can report details about the system, CPU, graphics, disks, network, memory, battery, audio, Bluetooth, RAID, sensors, USB, partitions and processes. Output can appear on screen or be written as JSON or XML to a file. For IRC clients, filtering is enabled by default; the -z option removes information such as IP and MAC addresses, serial numbers, location, home directory and hostname. The script can be installed or upgraded as a single file and is packaged by many Linux distributions. It requires Perl 5.008 or newer, lspci, ps, and the Linux /proc and /sys filesystems. Some detailed reports depend on optional programs, while certain features require root or sudo configuration. The FAQ states that inxi is licensed under GPL 3 or later. The listed options page gives version 3.3.41 dated 2026-07-01.