Debian GNU/Linux distribution and some derivatives such as Raspbian already have included Salt packages to their repositories. However, current stable Debian release contains old outdated Salt releases. It is recommended to use SaltStack repository for Debian as described below.
Installation from official Debian and Raspbian repositories is described here.
Packages for Debian 9 (Stretch) and Debian 8 (Jessie) are available in the Official SaltStack repository.
Instructions are at https://repo.saltstack.com/#debian.
Note
Regular security support for Debian 7 ended on April 25th 2016. As a result, 2016.3.1 and 2015.8.10 will be the last Salt releases for which Debian 7 packages are created.
The Debian distributions contain mostly old Salt packages built by the Debian Salt Team. You can install Salt components directly from Debian but it is recommended to use the instructions above for the packages from the official Salt repository.
On Jessie there is an option to install Salt minion from Stretch with python-tornado dependency from jessie-backports repositories.
To install fresh release of Salt minion on Jessie:
Add jessie-backports and stretch repositories:
Debian:
echo 'deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo 'deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian stretch main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
Raspbian:
echo 'deb http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/ stretch main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
Make Jessie a default release:
echo 'APT::Default-Release "jessie";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10apt
Install Salt dependencies:
Debian:
apt-get update
apt-get install python-zmq python-systemd/jessie-backports python-tornado/jessie-backports salt-common/stretch
Raspbian:
apt-get update
apt-get install python-zmq python-tornado/stretch salt-common/stretch
Install Salt minion package from Latest Debian Release:
apt-get install salt-minion/stretch
Install the Salt master, minion or other packages from the repository with the apt-get command. These examples each install one of Salt components, but more than one package name may be given at a time:
apt-get install salt-api
apt-get install salt-cloud
apt-get install salt-master
apt-get install salt-minion
apt-get install salt-ssh
apt-get install salt-syndic