Since SALTSTACK is available for a wide-range of operating systems, I'll detail briefly what is needed to install SALT and then refer you to the [official] documentation for further information.
SALTSTACK is available in most major linux distribution's repositories. SALTSTACK is also available for FreeBSD, Windows, Solaris, and Ubuntu Phone as well!
The recommended way to install SALTSTACK is to use your package manager. You also can install SALTSTACK from source by cloning the SALTSTACK Github repositories. Instructions are available in the repositories regarding the dependecies required prior to installation from source.
Often, you may want to use a newer version of SALT than is available currently from your distributions repositories. An easy way to install the dependencies first is to use your package manager to install whatever version of SALTSTACK is available, and then build the version you want from source.
SALT also has a fully automated shell-script that makes it even easier to install, if you have access to an outside network.
Using wget, you can install SALT with one command: wget -O - http://bootstrap.saltstack.org | sudo sh
You can find more information about SALT Bootstrap on the project page.
Throughout this book, I'll often demonstrate a SALT command using the salt-call command and also describe it using the salt command too. salt-call is often used during testing and it allows you to use SALT on a single machine without setting up a master.
You can very quickly get a basic SALTSTACK system running by installing just the salt-minion within a virtual-machine. This is a great way to test your state files and learn SALT without needing to set up a separate master and minion. You can also run SALT with the master and minion on the same machine if you like.
Throughout the SALTSTACK documentation, and this book, the master is referred to as the main controlling machine that instructs the minions. Minions are other individual machines that receive commands from the master. Your configuration files, known as state files, exist on the master as well as any other files that you want to transfer to the minions.
For the remainder of this book, I would recommend creating a new virtual-machine with your favorite operating system to use as a testing environment.
Using your package manger, or salt-bootstrap, install the salt-master package now.
In a typical linux-based SALTSTACK installation, you'll find the configuration files in /etc/salt and the master configuration file appropriately named master within that directory. A minion's configuration file will be named minion within the same /etc/salt folder.
The default configuration file is well-documented and you can probably leave it as it is. You may want to read through it though just to familiarize yourself with the various options available.
Now that the salt-master has been installed, you may need to start it. Depending on your operating system, you may need to use systemctl start salt-master or service salt-master start.
For this section of this book, go ahead and install the salt-minion using your package manager on the same machine that you installed the salt-master package on.
Before starting it, you'll need to make a few edits to the minion configuration file located within /etc/salt/minion first.
Again, this configuration file is well documented.
Open the minion file in your favorite text-editor and locate the line master:. This line tells the minion where the master is located.
Since you are using the same machine for both the minion and the master, locate the ip address of your machine and add it. Your configuration file should look something like this now:
master: 192.168.1.33
Also, add an id for easier reference:
id: myminion
Your minion file should now look something like this:
master: 192.168.1.33
id: myminion
Most likely your ip address will be different.
Now start the salt-minion using whatever method your system supports. I'll use $ service salt-minion start for this example.
Now with both the minion and master started and running you have successfully installed SALTSTACK! You are now ready to take control of your infrastructure with a powerful and fast remote execution and configuration management system.
If you were using two separate systems, you could now log out of your minion and probably never need to log in to it again. After the next section on Salt Keys, you'll have full-control of your minion from your master.
Before you can do anything with a newly installed minion, you'll need to accept its keys on the master first.
This is accomplished with the salt-key command.
Again, for this section your minion and master are the same machine, but later when you begin to actually use SALT, they will be on different machines. The salt-key command would be intitiated on the master
Log in to your master if you aren't already, and type the following:
# salt-key -L
This command will list all of the accepted, rejected, and pending keys within your master.
Hopefully you see a pending key for your newly installed minion.
Accepted Keys:
Denied Keys:
Unaccepted Keys:
myminion
Rejected Keys:
You now need to accept the key in order for the master to recognize the minion as authorized to communicated with it. You do this with the
# salt-key -a myminion
The following keys are going to be accepted:
Unaccepted Keys:
myminion
Proceed? [n/Y]
Press the Y key to accept the minion's key.
Key for minion myminion accepted.
It's possible to utilize a SALT minion without connecting it to a master. This is what is referred to as a masterless configuration.
All you'll need for this is the salt-minion installation. You'll need to edit the minion configuration and set the file_client: to local.
This is all you need for a masterless minion configuration:
file_client: local
id: myminion
You've now completed the installation of SALT and configured your systems to communicate with one-another. You should have a working SALT system to continue to learn on.
You can test the connection now with the test.ping command like this:
# salt '*' test.ping
Which should return:
local:
True
If you used salt-call, or:
yourminionname:
True
if you're using a master and minion configuration.