external facts are ignored by facter

Hello! Running puppet 3.7.2 on both the master and the client. The issue is that although external facts are being copied to the client during the puppet run, the do not turn up when I run facter -p. They do run when I run "facter --external-dir=/var/lib/puppet/facts.d/" Do I have to set something up in puppet.conf for facter to see that directory by default? Thanks!