Retrieve all installed packages and their versions from nodes

Question

I use puppet to manage package installations on a number of nodes. These nodes are used as software testing environments. It happens that packages are uninstalled during software tests or their version might change, depending on the test scenario.

Is it possible to retrieve a list of all currently installed packages on each of my nodes? A "snapshot" of the whole testing environment, so to say.

Thanks!

Answer 1

With Facter 2, you can create a custom fact that hands a hash structure to the master, e.g. package-name => package-version.

With PuppetDB, you can store all those fact values and retrieve them via the API.