Salt

Basics

Term	meaning
minion	slave, managed host
sls	salt state file, representation of the state the system should end up in
pillar	sensitive data, tree like structure, targeted and securely send to selected minions
grain	minion data, information for state to behave differently (minion os information)

Architecture

Each state is enforced on targeted minion. State during its execution uses modules. The difference between the two:

State	Module
Assert/enforce certain state on minion. They map to nice sls files	Executes a task

Configuration

Master configuration: /etc/salt/master
Master configuration overrides: /etc/salt/master.d/myoverrides.conf
Minion configuration: /etc/salt/minion

Pillar

Pillar subsystem can be extended to fetch data from various sources, use ext-pillar to achieve this.

file_tree

ext pillar: file_tree File becomes the value of key
Under the root_dir you must have either hosts/minion_id folder or nodegroups/nodegroup folder
Data is available to matching hosts.
Example configuration:

ext_pillar:
  - file_tree:
      root_dir: /path/to/root/directory
      keep_newline:
        - files/testdir/*

Evaluation order during execution

Jinja -> YAML -> highstate -> low state -> execution

Usage

Execute states from given environment: salt '*' state.highstate saltenv=base
Execute state: salt '*' state.apply <statename> [saltenv=<env>]

salt-api

Using curl to communicate with API: curl -sSk https://salt.local:9191/login -H 'Accept: application/x-yaml' -d username=saltuser -d password=saltpassword -d eauth=auto

References:

1. https://repo.saltstack.com/
2. https://docs.saltstack.com/en/getstarted/config/functions.html
3. https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/states_pt1.html
4. https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/highstate.html
5. https://github.com/saltstack/salt-bootstrap
6. https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/configuration/master.html
7. https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/development/conventions/formulas.html