Last week we talked about creating a simple httpd service when we spin up our vagrant VM. This week I will continue to talk more about Salt.

Inside The Vagrant Virtual Machine

Salt run in /srv/ folder in our VM. Therefore our folder structure in virtual machine will look like this.

- /srv/
  - pillar/  # Unlike state tree, pillar data is only available for the targeted minion specified by the matcher type.
  - salt/  # All the configuration for the minion to run
- /etc/salt/
    - minion  #minion configuration
    - master  #master configuration

Running in Master-less vs Master mode

• Master-less mode

salt-call --local state.highstate

• Master mode: salt-minion need to accept the salt-key first

salt '*' state.highstate

For running vagrant, we use master-less mode, the different between master mode and master-less mode shouldn’t be large.

Objective

To create user(s) base on pillar files, uninstall httpd and install nginx

Coding

• Vagrantfile: mount the desired folder to your VM

config.vm.synced_folder "salt/root/", "/srv/salt/"
config.vm.synced_folder "salt/pillar/", "/srv/pillar/"

• /srv/pillar/users/init.sls: Sensitive user data

users:
    henglim.ng:
        uid: 1000
        fullname: Heng Lim Ng
        groups:
            - wheel

• /srv/pillar/top.sls: Include any new pillar data here

base:
  '*':
    - users

• /srv/salt/top.sls: the list of action we want to perform in env ‘base’, according to our objective

base:
  '*':
    - httpd.absent
    - user
    - nginx

• /srv/salt/user/init.sls: make use of our pillar users

{% for username, user in pillar.get('users', {}).items() %}
{{username}}:
  user.present:
    - fullname: {{user.fullname}}
    - shell: /bin/bash
    - home: /home/{{username}}
    - groups: {{user.groups}}
{% endfor %}

• /srv/salt/httpd/absent.sls: make sure we uninstalled the httpd that we have installed

httpd:               # ID declaration
  pkg.removed: []

/var/www/html/index.html:
  file.absent: []

• /srv/salt/nginx/init.sls: yum search for nginx, if found, install nginx and enable it.

nginx:               # ID declaration
  pkg.installed: []
  service.running:
    - enable: True

To Be Continue

In this post I mainly described how to make use of pillar to manage our VM user, uninstalling and installing of services using yum packages. Stay tuned for the SaltStack Vagrant Part 3.