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I've tried reading the saltstack doc many times, I still am very confused. To the point that I've stuck to ansible, despite truly thinking saltstacks might be b

I've tried reading the saltstack doc many times, I still am very confused. To the point that I've stuck to ansible, despite truly thinking saltstacks might be better. Is there any not confusing doc about saltstack available?

tapoxi 10y ago
They recently rewrote the tutorial, which is available here: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/getstarted/ https://docs.saltstack.com/en/getstarted/ The easiest way to learn Salt is by starting with execution modules (https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/index.html https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/index.h...), which are just Python modules that abstract the commands underneath and you can blast to machines, such as salt 'web~' pkg.install httpd to install Apache on all servers named web. You can send shell commands directly using cmd.run - salt 'web~' cmd.run 'yum -y install httpd' (Note: I replaced asterisks with tildes in the above example due to HN formatting.) On top of execution modules are state modules (https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/ https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/). You define a state in YAML and tell a host to execute the state with the state.apply execution module. States consist of an id (a unique string identifier), the state module to use, and arguments, like so: base.packages.stable.install: pkg.installed: - pkgs: - git - zsh - mosh The other major components are runners (https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/runners/ https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/runners/), which are scripts written against the salt API that perform actions on the salt bus, and engines (https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/engines/index.html https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/engines/index.ht...), which are child processes spawned by the master that listen for and react to events - like the Slack bot I use. One of the included engines is called reactor, which makes it easy to script events in YAML. There are more moving parts I'm not covering here, but I hope this helps you get started.

tapoxi 10y ago

They recently rewrote the tutorial, which is available here: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/getstarted/ https://docs.saltstack.com/en/getstarted/ The easiest way to learn Salt is by starting with execution modules (https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/index.html https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/index.h...), which are just Python modules that abstract the commands underneath and you can blast to machines, such as salt 'web~' pkg.install httpd to install Apache on all servers named web. You can send shell commands directly using cmd.run - salt 'web~' cmd.run 'yum -y install httpd' (Note: I replaced asterisks with tildes in the above example due to HN formatting.) On top of execution modules are state modules (https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/ https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/). You define a state in YAML and tell a host to execute the state with the state.apply execution module. States consist of an id (a unique string identifier), the state module to use, and arguments, like so: base.packages.stable.install: pkg.installed: - pkgs: - git - zsh - mosh The other major components are runners (https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/runners/ https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/runners/), which are scripts written against the salt API that perform actions on the salt bus, and engines (https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/engines/index.html https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/engines/index.ht...), which are child processes spawned by the master that listen for and react to events - like the Slack bot I use. One of the included engines is called reactor, which makes it easy to script events in YAML. There are more moving parts I'm not covering here, but I hope this helps you get started.