Salt Proxy Minion End-to-End Example¶

The following is walkthrough that documents how to run a sample REST service and configure one or more proxy minions to talk to and control it.

1. Ideally, create a Python virtualenv in which to run the REST service. This is not strictly required, but without a virtualenv you will need to install bottle via pip globally on your system

2. Clone https://github.com/saltstack/salt-contrib and copy the contents of the directory proxyminion_rest_example somewhere on a machine that is reachable from the machine on which you want to run the salt-proxy. This machine needs Python 2.7 or later.

3. Install bottle version 0.12.8 via pip or easy_install

pip install bottle==0.12.8

4. Run python rest.py --help for usage

5. Start the REST API on an appropriate port and IP.

6. Load the REST service's status page in your browser by going to the IP/port combination (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:8000)

7. You should see a page entitled "Salt Proxy Minion" with two sections, one for "services" and one for "packages" and you should see a log entry in the terminal where you started the REST process indicating that the index page was retrieved.

Now, configure your salt-proxy.

1. Edit /etc/salt/proxy and add an entry for your master's location

master: localhost

2. On your salt-master, ensure that pillar is configured properly. Select an ID for your proxy (in this example we will name the proxy with the letter 'p' followed by the port the proxy is answering on). In your pillar topfile, place an entry for your proxy:

base:
  'p8000':
    - p8000

This says that Salt's pillar should load some values for the proxy p8000 from the file /srv/pillar/p8000.sls (if you have not changed your default pillar_roots)

3. In the pillar root for your base environment, create the p8000.sls file with the following contents:

proxy:
  proxytype: rest_sample
  url: http://<IP your REST listens on>:port

In other words, if your REST service is listening on port 8000 on 127.0.0.1 the 'url' key above should say url: http://127.0.0.1:8000

4. Make sure your salt-master is running.

5. Start the salt-proxy in debug mode

salt-proxy --proxyid=p8000 -l debug

6. Accept your proxy's key on your salt-master

salt-key -y -a p8000
The following keys are going to be accepted:
Unaccepted Keys:
p8000
Key for minion p8000 accepted.

7. Now you should be able to ping your proxy. When you ping, you should see a log entry in the terminal where the REST service is running.

salt p8000 test.version

8. The REST service implements a degenerately simple pkg and service provider as well as a small set of grains. To "install" a package, use a standard pkg.install. If you pass '==' and a verrsion number after the package name then the service will parse that and accept that as the package's version.

9. Try running salt p8000 grains.items to see what grains are available. You can target proxies via grains if you like.

10. You can also start and stop the available services (apache, redbull, and postgresql with service.start, etc.

11. States can be written to target the proxy. Feel free to experiment with them.