salt

Last Updated: 10/30/2024


WARNING: This article is also under construction.

SaltStack (also known as Salt) is a Python-based, open-source tool that helps system administrators manage and automate IT infrastructure, including servers, networks, and the cloud. A Salt stack is composed of a Salt-master and Salt-Minions.

The salt-minion is a single process that sits on machines to be managed by Salt. It can either operate as a stand-alone daemon which accepts commands locally via ‘salt-call’ or it can connect back to a master and receive commands remotely

Please see the documentation in the first Reference entry. it will detail your installation instructions for various Linux Distributions.

In this post we are going to run through a general installation, so that we can become familiar with the binaries, configurations files, and get an idea of the general use case. We may also need to become failiar with something called a “state”.

We are going to discuss installing a Salt master and Salt-mnion on Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install salt-master

Life is nice for once. Now that we have installed the salt-master and salt-minion we need to know how to create a relationship between the two.

sudo systemctl restart salt-master

When :”salt-master” is installed it generates a set of keys that can be listed as.

salt-key -F master

Installing the salt-minion:

On the server that has been spun up, in this case named salt1 with ip 192.168.160.55.

apt install salt-minion

Configuring the Satt Minion- Link

From the master:

salt-key -L

salt-run manage.up
salt-run manage.status
salt-run manage.down

salt-run manage.alived

salt '*' grains.get id

Accepting the Salt-minions key – Link

To accept a key on the salt-master.

salt-key -a salt1

Send a test ping – Link

salt '*' test.version

To Run a command against all salt-minions:

salt '*' cmd.run 'apt upgrade -y'

Salt packages/modules: more about this in a moment.

• salt-common
• salt-ssh
• salt-syndic
• salt-cloud
• salt-api

Reference:
https://docs.saltproject.io/salt/install-guide/en/latest/topics/install-by-operating-system/ubuntu.html#install-salt-on-ubuntu-24-04-noble-amd64
https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/development/architecture.html
https://docs.saltproject.io/salt/user-guide/en/latest/topics/states.html
https://docs.saltproject.io/salt/install-guide/en/latest/topics/configure-master-minion.html
https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/targeting/index.html