Learning Saltstack

174 Pages·2015·1.242 MB·English

by  Colton Myers

Learning SaltStack
Learn how to manage your infrastructure by utilizing the
power of SaltStack
Colton Myers
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Learning SaltStack
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing
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First published: January 2015
Production reference: 1210115
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78439-460-8
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Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Colton Myers Neha Thakur
Reviewers Proofreaders
Darrel Clute Simran Bhogal
Cameron R. Lane Stephen Copestake
Hoàng Đình Quân Maria Gould
Ameesha Green
Commissioning Editor Paul Hindle
Pramila Balan
Indexer
Acquisition Editor Tejal Soni
Kevin Colaco
Production Coordinator
Content Development Editor Alwin Roy
Parita Khedekar
Cover Work
Technical Editor Alwin Roy
Vijin Boricha
Copy Editors
Sarang Chari
Relin Hedly
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.
I would like to thank my friends and family for the support they've
given me while writing this book. I especially want to thank my
parents, Mark and Annette, as I would not be who or where I am
without their support. Finally, I'd like to thank Thomas Hatch, the
creator of SaltStack, who gave me the opportunity to help develop
such a great piece of software.
About the Reviewers
Darrel Clute is an IT Infrastructure Architect. Throughout his career, he has been
predominately focused on network engineering, but has spent equal amounts of
time on systems engineering, primarily with UNIX-based systems. Besides his
employment, he is also an advocate for open source software used in the enterprise
as well as for individuals, but will never advocate the use of open source purely for
the sake of it.
Outside his core competencies, Darrel also has extensive experience with proprietary
and open source virtualization platforms. His knowledge and experience in IaaS
solutions such as OpenStack are constantly increasing as well. Additionally, through
his systems engineering experience, he has been exposed to and supported various
web and enterprise applications. The most recent exposure has been to PaaS
solutions, and this has led to advocation that either a public or private cloud offering
is not complete without a coupling of both Iaas and PaaS solutions designed and
deployed in lockstep.
Besides core infrastructure, he has, at various times, and especially more so recently,
been developing programming skills to augment his daily activities. Throughout his
career, Darrel has utilized various languages and utilities to automate infrastructure.
Some of his programming has been with the use of Bash, Net-SNMP, Sed, and Awk,
and holistically with Python.
Cameron R. Lane is a full-stack engineer with an interest in a broad range
of languages and technologies. He is currently a senior software developer at
Synapp.io in Atlanta, GA, where he designs and builds scalable APIs for the
Web using MongoDB and Python.
I would like to thank my wife, Stephanie, for her understanding
and patience through all of life's changes, big and small. It is her
support that gives me the motivation and confidence to take on big
challenges. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Synapp.io,
who teach me something new about technology every day.
Hoàng Đình Quân is a Vietnamese System Administrator with experience in
operating Network Infrastructure and OpenStack cloud platform automation tools
(such as Ansible and SaltStack).
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Diving In – Our First Salt Commands 7
Introducing Salt 7
Installing Salt 8
Installation with system packages (Ubuntu) 9
Installing with Salt-Bootstrap 10
Configuring Salt 11
Firewall configuration 11
Salt minion configuration 12
Starting the Salt master and Salt minion 13
Accepting the minion key on the master 14
A game of ping pong 15
Masterless Salt 18
Summary 20
Chapter 2: Controlling Your Minions with Remote Execution 21
The structure of a remote execution command 21
Command-line options 22
Targeting strings 25
Glob matching 25
Perl-compatible regular expression matching 26
List matching 28
Grain and pillar matching 28
Compound matching 33
Remote execution modules and functions 35
Adding users 37
Installing packages 38
Managing services 41
Monitoring minion states 42
Running arbitrary commands 43
Summary 45