Book Image

Learning SaltStack - Second Edition

By : Myers
Book Image

Learning SaltStack - Second Edition

By: Myers

Overview of this book

SaltStack is one of the best infrastructure management platforms available. It provides powerful tools for defining and enforcing the state of your infrastructure in a clear, concise way. With this book learn how to use these tools for your own infrastructure by understanding the core pieces of Salt. In this book we will take you from the initial installation of Salt, through running their first commands, and then talk about extending Salt for individual use cases. From there you will explore the state system inside of Salt, learning to define the desired state of our infrastructure in such a way that Salt can enforce that state with a single command. Finally, you will learn about some of the additional tools that salt provides, including salt-cloud, the reactor, and the event system. We?ll finish by exploring how to get involved with salt and what'?s new in the salt community. Finally, by the end of the book, you'll be able to build a reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure and fully utilize the power of cloud computing.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

The pieces of a state declaration


Just as with our remote execution commands, state declarations can be broken up into multiple pieces. Here is our state from before:

install_apache:
  pkg.installed:
    - name: apache2

Here is information about how the pieces line up and what each piece of the state declaration is called:

<ID Declaration>:
  <State Module>.<Function>:
    - name: <name>
    - <Function Arg>
    - <Function Arg>
    - <Function Arg>
    - <Requisite Declaration>:
      - <Requisite Reference>

The preceding reference and more advanced examples can be found in the Salt documentation at http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/highstate.html#large-example.

We haven't talked about requisites yet, so ignore that section for the moment.

We start with the ID of our state. This is a string that must be unique across all of the states we are running at a given time. Note that it doesn't have to follow stringent requirements like...