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Target Nodes Installation

On most distributions, you can set up a Salt Minion with the Salt Bootstrap .

Note

In every two-step example, you would be well-served to examine the downloaded file and examine it to ensure that it does what you expect.

Using curl to install latest git:

curl -L https://bootstrap.saltstack.com -o install_salt.sh
sudo sh install_salt.sh git develop

Using wget to install your distribution’s stable packages:

wget -O install_salt.sh https://bootstrap.saltstack.com
sudo sh install_salt.sh

Install a specific version from git using wget:

wget -O install_salt.sh https://bootstrap.saltstack.com
sudo sh install_salt.sh -P git v2015.5

On the above example we added -P which will allow PIP packages to be installed if required but it’s no a necessary flag for git based bootstraps.

Basic minion Configuration

Salt configuration is very simple. The only requirement for setting up a minion is to set the location of the master in the minion configuration file.

The configuration files will be installed to /etc/salt and are named after the respective components, /etc/salt/master, and /etc/salt/minion.

Setting Salt Master host

Although there are many Salt Minion configuration options, configuring a Salt Minion is very simple. By default a Salt Minion will try to connect to the DNS name “salt”; if the Minion is able to resolve that name correctly, no configuration is needed.

If the DNS name “salt” does not resolve to point to the correct location of the Master, redefine the “master” directive in the minion configuration file, typically /etc/salt/minion, as follows:

- #master: salt
+ master: 10.0.0.1

Setting Salt minion ID

Then explicitly declare the ID for this minion to use. Since Salt uses detached IDs it is possible to run multiple minions on the same machine but with different IDs.

id: foo.bar.com

After updating the configuration files, restart the Salt minion.

# Ubuntu
service salt-minion restart

# Redhat
systemctl enable salt-minion.service
systemctl start salt-minion

See the minion configuration reference for more details about other configurable options.