Salt Essentials

Chapter 2. Quick Start: First Taste of Salt

There are a lot of terms and commands that are specific to Salt. Rather than discuss them at an abstract level, let’s dive right in and run some very simple commands. In order to proceed, you will need several minions set up and configured to communicate with your Salt master. In this book’s companion code, there is a Vagrant file you can use to quickly set up five hosts: a single master and four minions. Most details are given in Appendix A. If you already have your hosts set up and Salt installed, you can skip ahead to “Starting Up”.

Note

If you used the companion code’s Vagrant configuration, the Salt daemons are already started. However, you should still read “Starting Up” to become familiar with the process.

Single-Master Setup

The most straightforward and common use of Salt is to have a few minions attached to a single master. We will set up a single master and then configure a couple of minions to talk to that master.

But first we need to figure out how to install Salt. Both minion and master share a great deal of code. We will install all of the core libraries on all hosts: minions and our single master. There are some command-line utilities that make sense only to run on the master (e.g., salt-run and salt). If they are installed on a host without the correct master configuration, they will report an error and do nothing. It is not harmful to have the master-specific utilities installed on the minions, but it can lead to confusion. ...