State 'pip.installed' was not found in SLS

[piersf]

Hello there,

We upgraded Saltstack to Nitrogen release (version 2017.7.3) from Carbon(version 2016.11.1) two days ago.
Currently, we are facing an issue with the pip.installed state when pushing to a minion. Both master and minion are running the same 2017.7.3 version. My state looks like below

virtualenv:
  pip.installed:
    - require:
      - pkg: python-pip

python-pip:
  pkg.installed

When running above states, we get an error saying:

----------
          ID: virtualenv
    Function: pip.installed
      Result: False
     Comment: State 'pip.installed' was not found in SLS 'path.to.sls.python-virtualenv'
              Reason: 'pip.installed' is not available.
     Changes:
----------

The salt-master and minion versions is:

Salt Version:
           Salt: 2017.7.3

Dependency Versions:
           cffi: Not Installed
       cherrypy: Not Installed
       dateutil: Not Installed
      docker-py: Not Installed
          gitdb: Not Installed
      gitpython: Not Installed
          ioflo: Not Installed
         Jinja2: 2.8.1
        libgit2: Not Installed
        libnacl: Not Installed
       M2Crypto: Not Installed
           Mako: Not Installed
   msgpack-pure: Not Installed
 msgpack-python: 0.4.6
   mysql-python: Not Installed
      pycparser: Not Installed
       pycrypto: 2.6.1
   pycryptodome: Not Installed
         pygit2: Not Installed
         Python: 2.7.14 (default, Jan 31 2018, 02:12:13)
   python-gnupg: Not Installed
         PyYAML: 3.11
          PyZMQ: 14.5.0
           RAET: Not Installed
          smmap: Not Installed
        timelib: Not Installed
        Tornado: 4.2.1
            ZMQ: 4.0.5

System Versions:
           dist: redhat 6.9 Santiago
         locale: UTF-8
        machine: x86_64
        release: 2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64
         system: Linux
        version: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.9 Santiago

Searching on internet, I came across https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/salt-users/x3yX0cBasXw/XyaEGHsQ-nYJ and #24925 which basically say that I need to add reload_modules: True in the pip.installed state.
I have tried adding that but it does not seem to fix anything.

However, when I push the same states from the master running Nitrogen to a minion running Carbon, the above works fine - no issues.
The versions of that Carbon salt-minion are:

Salt Version:
           Salt: 2016.11.1

Dependency Versions:
           cffi: Not Installed
       cherrypy: Not Installed
       dateutil: 1.4.1
          gitdb: Not Installed
      gitpython: Not Installed
          ioflo: Not Installed
         Jinja2: 2.7.3
        libgit2: Not Installed
        libnacl: Not Installed
       M2Crypto: 0.20.2
           Mako: Not Installed
   msgpack-pure: Not Installed
 msgpack-python: 0.4.6
   mysql-python: Not Installed
      pycparser: Not Installed
       pycrypto: 2.6.1
         pygit2: Not Installed
         Python: 2.6.6 (r266:84292, May 22 2015, 08:34:51)
   python-gnupg: 0.3.8
         PyYAML: 3.11
          PyZMQ: 14.5.0
           RAET: Not Installed
          smmap: Not Installed
        timelib: Not Installed
        Tornado: 4.2.1
            ZMQ: 4.0.5

System Versions:
           dist: redhat 6.8 Santiago
        machine: x86_64
        release: 2.6.32-642.3.1.el6.x86_64
         system: Linux
        version: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.8 Santiago

The main difference between the Nitrogen salt-minion and the Carbon salt-minion are the version of Python they are using, with the first using Python: 2.7.14 (default, Jan 31 2018, 02:12:13) and the second using Python: 2.6.6 (r266:84292, May 22 2015, 08:34:51)

Any idea on why is this breaking? Why would it work against a minion running Carbon version but nor against a minion running Nitrogen?

Thanks,

[gtmanfred]

You will need the python27-pip package for nitrogen, What is failing is that salt-minion on centos 6 2017.7 uses python27, because we have dropped support for python2.6.

And the pip modules requires an importable pip module in order to run version comparisons.

virtualenv:
  pip.installed:
    - require:
      - pkg: pip

pip
  pkg.installed:
    - pkgs:
      - python27-pip
      - python-pip
    - reload_modules: true

If you want to make sure that you are pip installing to the python26 environment, you will need to do something like the above.