Learning SaltStack

Colton Myers

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781784394608
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cloud Computing
• Index: Computer Science

Learning SaltStack

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Table of Contents

Learning SaltStack

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Diving In – Our First Salt Commands

Introducing Salt

Installing Salt

Installation with system packages (Ubuntu)

Installing with Salt-Bootstrap

Configuring Salt

Firewall configuration

Salt minion configuration

Starting the Salt master and Salt minion

Accepting the minion key on the master

A game of ping pong

Masterless Salt

Summary

2. Controlling Your Minions with Remote Execution

The structure of a remote execution command

Command-line options

Targeting strings

Glob matching

Perl-compatible regular expression matching

List matching

Grain and pillar matching

Grains

Pillars

Compound matching

Remote execution modules and functions

Adding users

Installing packages

Managing services

Monitoring minion states

Running arbitrary commands

Summary

3. Execution Modules – Write Your Own Solution

Exploring the source

Cross-calling execution modules

Grains and the __virtual__ function

The__opts__ and __pillar__ functions

Reformatting return data

An advanced example

Summary

4. Defining the State of Your Infrastructure

Our first state

The pieces of a state declaration

Expanding to encompass multiple pieces of state

Dependencies using requisites

The require requisite

The watch requisite

Other requisites

The _in requisites

Summary

5. Expanding Our States with Jinja2 and Pillar

Adding a new minion

Jinja2

apache2 or httpd?

Defining secure minion-specific data in pillar

Using pillar data in states

Summary

6. The Highstate and Environments

The highstate

Environments

Environments in pillar

Expanding our base environment

Storing our states in Git with GitFS

Summary

7. Using Salt Cloud to Manage Virtual Minions

Setting up Salt Cloud

Setting up Linode

Creating an API key

Creating a cloud provider configuration

Creating cloud VM profiles

Create and destroy machines

Managing groups of VMs with map files

Creating new masters with map files

Summary

8. The Reactor and the Event System

The Salt event system

Listening for events

Event structure

Firing events from Salt

Firing events from custom code

Reacting to events

Summary

Index

Learning SaltStack

Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: January 2015

Production reference: 1210115

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78439-460-8

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author

Colton Myers

Reviewers

Darrel Clute

Cameron R. Lane

Hoàng Đình Quân

Commissioning Editor

Pramila Balan

Acquisition Editor

Kevin Colaco

Content Development Editor

Parita Khedekar

Technical Editor

Vijin Boricha

Copy Editors

Sarang Chari

Relin Hedly

Project Coordinator

Neha Thakur

Proofreaders

Simran Bhogal

Stephen Copestake

Maria Gould

Ameesha Green

Paul Hindle

Indexer

Tejal Soni

Production Coordinator

Alwin Roy

Cover Work

Alwin Roy

About the Author

Colton Myers is a software engineer living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Since graduating with a BS in computer science from the University of Utah, he has worked professionally writing software in Python. Colton loves working on open source software, and he has represented the US PyCon conference as a speaker multiple times.

He is a SaltStack Certified Trainer and has worked on the Salt open source software for years. At the time of writing this book, Colton was working as a platform engineer for SaltStack.

You can find him on Twitter and GitHub at @basepi.

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Table of contents

• Learning SaltStack