Purpose

One of the problems I commonly run into is testing and verifying Salt states for a stand alone minion or a cluster (Salt master with minions). This README focuses on the latter but the work here can be easily modified to work for a single Salt minion.

I also wanted this example to embrace some "devops" principles

• Ability to replicate a similar production environment
• Provide a quick feedback loop
• Automate:
  • Bringing an environment up quickly
  • Ensure it is repeatable.
• Testing

Requirements:

• docker
• docker-compose
• Python 3.6
• pipenv: pip3 install pipenv
• mo: pip3 install mo

Getting Started

The steps below will launch a Salt master and two Salt minions. To get you started, the minions will expose ports 9090 and 9091 and the example states will setup nginx and serve a custom index.yaml.

1. git clone https://github.com/chhibber/saltstack-docker.git
2. mo up
3. Make your Salt state edits. The Salt states are mounted into the running salt-master instance. This allows you to modify them on the fly outside of the container
4. docker exec saltstackdocker_master_1 salt "*" state.highstate

Example

To a see a full walkthrough that:

• Cleans up
• Bootstraps a new environment
• Runs highstate (puts nginx on the box and has it serve a index.yaml)
• Runs tests against the minions to verify they are configured correctly
• Modifies nginx to revert back to the default index file: index.nginx-debian.html
• Run tests against the minions to verify the default index is in place

mo example-run

Notable

• Using mo - a yaml based task runner. I appreciate and prefer the YAML based syntax of defining simple jobs over Make. You see this as a common pattern in a number of modern build systems.
• Using pipenv for virtual env and dependency management
• Using testinfra to verify system configuration after running the Salt states. The backend connection features are great and took what originally would have been a tedious job and made it really simple.