Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Chapter 8.  Using Salt with REST

We've discussed using Salt not only to manage an infrastructure from within, but also to grow the infrastructure with Salt Cloud. But what happens when you need to manage your infrastructure from the outside? Or if you want your infrastructure to take advantage of external systems? In this chapter, we'll explore how Salt makes use of REST interfaces, both as a client and as a server. We'll be covering the following topics:

• Taking advantage of Salt's HTTP library
• Setting up the Salt API
• Communicating as a client or a server
• Parsing data
• Reacting with Thorium

Looking at Salt's HTTP library

An increasing number of subsystems inside Salt are designed to make use of external APIs. At the moment, most of these are drivers ...